Yahoo Finance My first boss: Dr Alan Hudd, from British rocket scientist to inkjet printing disruptor
Dr Alan Hudd helped to invent the synthetic Shell oil we still all use in our cars for his PhD at Manchester University. Hudd then joined the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in Waltham Abbey in the 1980s, where he helped develop some of the anti-tank rockets being used in the Ukraine war.
In 2008, he sold his business Xennia, a world-leading inkjet innovator, for a multi-million pound sum and the 67-year-old has since founded Alchemie Technology in a bid to revolutionise the way our clothes are manufactured.
I spent eight years developing rockets and missiles for the MoD and when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reached their agreement, the UK defence was in rundown mode. I sought another job and joined a Cambridge-based company called Domino Printing Sciences, which has become the most successful tech company to come out of the city.
The previous day I had been developing rockets and and on my first day at Domino I was told to boil an egg to check if the ‘best before’ date came off, which it did.
Once I got over the initial confusion, its founder Graeme Minto gave me his full support. I knew nothing about inkjets but Graeme, who had started out as a project leader at Cambridge Consultants, was becoming the world expert. I was the only chemist who had entered an engineering company and Graeme saw how important it was to build a revenue stream based on supplying the ink to the printers that put the best before dates on packages.
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And so started the initiative to build an ink development team. He told me that ‘I don’t know what you’ve got to do, but I will help you find out what you have to do.'
The story goes that one weekend he glued a load of breakfast cereals together into the shape of the printer he wanted to develop. He came into the office the next day and said that this was the product the company was going to build.
He would also do things like buy a car, rip out the seats and weld the car to his configuration. He was a pretty determined, entrepreneurial character and after six months I realised I wanted to set up a company of my own. I stayed for eight years at Domino and Graeme resigned after two years, yet he was the support and inspiration in building my career.
I became an expert in inkjet technology before attempting a buyout over the division where it went three to two against me. There is only one thing to do if it doesn’t go in your favour and so I set up, aged 40, a company called Xennia in 1996, building it up into a world-leading industrial inkjet company.
One of the things we set out to solve was the problem in decorating ceramic tiles. Back in the 2000s this was a brand new idea. We supplied thousands of hardware printing systems into China to decorate ceramic tiles and it was an example of changing a dinosaur industry.
It was very successful and I sold Xennia in 2008 to Dutch company Royal TenCate which specialised in supplying in technical textile fabrics; Xennia had become too grey-suited for my liking and I had started to get interested in textiles and how big an industry it was.
I set up Alchemie as a result of going round the world for a year to find the basis of a technology that could solve problems in the textile industry. For the next four years we started to invent the technology for digitally supplying the fluids onto textile fabrics. I found what an awful industry it was historically, from our cotton mills and river pollution to China, which has dominated the dying and finishing of textile fabrics.
The textile industry is the second biggest polluter of all industries. At Alchemie we can dye textile fabrics with 95% less water than traditionally done. If we can pull it off, we will literally be saving lives because of the water pollution in areas of the world where demand for clean water is even greater.
We can also now dye fabric using 85% less energy. If this is calculated into the textile industry, then it would be a 3% reduction in global emissions. This technology has the ability to disrupt the industry.
We launched our £1.5m machine during COVID. We have sold four and within two years we want to be supplying around 300 systems every year. It is a heck of a growth in terms of the amount of people and scale up you need.
When I first set up Xennia, Graeme was generous in his time and advice. He told me, ‘Stick to your objective, listen to everybody you can and make up your mind when you have and go for it.’ He then told me that whenever you meet anybody 'make sure the other guy pays for the coffee!'
He was certainly his own man. He never told you what to do, but would work with you. It was a bumpy ride at Domino but he was a fearless leader.
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When you are young and entering this world of work, it is hard to see which way is up. To have someone who supported you was inspirational in the way that he showed me how to build a career with focus.
It was Graeme who said that if you want to be successful you just want to be 10% more intelligent, work 10% harder and be 10% more determined than anyone else. Graeme showed that and I guess today we don’t put enough emphasis on success and winning — it tends to be all inclusive.
Nobody entered a technology business simply to make money. For me it was the challenge and wanting to succeed. Being successful from a monetary point of view is an instrument to measure your success and what you set out to achieve.
Alchemie Technology is on a mission to eliminate pollutions from textile dyeing and finishing
