SNG Barratt
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, to think that we would be here to celebrate 60 years of the E-type and to be able to say that this iconic Jaguar is still going strong, would be almost inconceivable.
The final Series 3 cars had been a tough sell for Jaguar and some of the, now much prized, earlier cars were being dismantled for their components. Jaguar had all but given up on the parts supply, thinking that this relic of the swinging 60s would be forgotten, along with the mini-skirts and flares.
Yet, it was into this period that SNG Barratt was founded, initially from the garage, garden and kitchen table of the home of Stephen and Hazel Barratt in rural Shropshire. Stephen had owned an E-type and, on struggling to find the parts he needed to keep the car running, had purchased another car as a donor vehicle. Once he had taken off the parts that he needed from the donor, he put an advert in a local newspaper offering the rest of the parts for sale. The phone started ringing and never stopped.
As the company moved into the 2000s, SNG Barratt introduced catalogues to showcase the huge range of products that were available, having previously relied upon price lists or simply word-of-mouth. The first was a 300-page classic called “The Ultimate Jaguar Parts Catalogue”, which is still used as a reference guide today by some members of the sales teams, despite being long out of print. This was followed by a range of more specialised catalogues including a special edition for the E-type 50th anniversary in 2011. And despite SNG Barratt distributing this catalogue for free at the time, this gold-coloured special issue has since become something of a collector’s item on eBay, selling for good money too!
The 50th anniversary in 2011 also saw the arrival of 50EE at SNG Barratt, an E-type Series 1 Roadster that the company decided to restore as part of the celebrations. It was intended to be used as a show-car to demonstrate the parts we could offer, but over the years that followed, the car became much more important to us than a simple marketing tool, covering 1000’s of miles road-testing numerous new products and now an integral member of the SNG Barratt family. Today, we own many different Jaguar models that are used for road-testing new products.
Today, SNG Barratt continues to be run by Julian Barratt. The company has come a long way since those early days of clearing parts off the kitchen table so dinner could be served.
With a team of over one hundred people supplying tens of thousands of parts all over the world, the company is dedicated to keeping Jaguars on the road. In-house production combines time-honoured manufacturing skills with new technologies, such as 3D printing and scanning, to keep the quality and availability of parts as high as possible for customers far and wide, ranging from enthusiasts in their garage to large OEM manufacturers such as JLR and Aston Martin.
