Advance Tapes Brand Guidelines: A 1964 Leicester Tape Maker, Cloth Coating & Advance GAFFA

Three colleagues who did not want to move.

Advance Tapes tells its own beginning as a story about staying put. According to the history on its website, David Ayres, Harry “Holly” Holyoake and Peter Hargrave all worked for Dalmas, which announced that its business would move to Chorley, in Lancashire; none of the three wanted to go. In 1964, the company says, Ayres suggested to the other two that they set up an adhesive-tape company of their own, “and Advance Tapes is born.”

The public record starts a little later. Companies House, the UK company register, shows the present company incorporated on 1 April 1968 as Advance Tapes (U.K.) Limited; it took its current name, Advance Tapes International, in June 1993. The company is private, still active, and registered at Thurmaston, on the northern edge of Leicester. The brand counts its age from 1964 — its slogan is “On a roll since 1964” — so the two dates belong to the same business told two ways.

The company’s timeline describes steady growth through the 1970s and 1980s. It says it joined Afera, the European self-adhesive tape association, in 1969 and won an award for exports the same year; founded a sister company in France, at Meaux, in 1975; and set up Advance Tapes Deutschland in 1979, first at Andernach and later at Kornwestheim. It records a 1981 visit by the Prince of Wales to its Abbey Meadows factory, a donation of tape to the Live Aid concert in London in 1985, British Standard quality approval for Abbey Meadows in 1987, and the opening of a second factory in 1988.

The company says David Ayres was appointed OBE in 1991 for services to export, and that it gained Investor in People accreditation in 1996, which it still holds.

Cloth coating, film tapes and named ranges.

Advance Tapes makes its own tape rather than only reselling it, and its website is built around that point. It says it is “designed, engineered, and manufactured in Britain,” from its Leicester site, where a technical team “develops, coats, and converts” its tapes. It calls itself independent, and says that independence lets it develop its own adhesive systems.

The company describes two halves to the work. Coating puts adhesive onto a carrier — cloth, PVC or polythene — and the company says it has coated cloth-backed tapes for more than sixty years. In 2013, its timeline says, it installed a fully automated adhesive mixing and cloth coating line at Advance Coating. Converting slits and rewinds the coated material into finished rolls or into “logs” for customers who cut their own; the company says it opened a purpose-built converting site and head office, Advance Converting, at Thurmaston in 2012, and that it also has converting facilities at its French operation. In 2015, it says, the old Abbey Meadows site made its last roll of cloth tape.

Its product pages are organised by tape type — cloth, double-sided, foil, masking, polyester, self-amalgamating, polypropylene, polyethylene and PVC — and by market, from aerospace and building to defence, entertainment and nuclear work. Products carry AT numbers rather than names. The AT7 is the one the company itself singles out: in 2014 it was given a special gold label for the firm’s fiftieth birthday.

Two ranges carry brand names of their own. Advance GAFFA, sold under the line “The Tape Behind The Show,” covers tapes for stage, screen and live events: ultra-matt and matt cloth tapes, a satin cloth, a matt black aluminium foil for light control, a PVC tape for dance floors and a fluorescent cloth tape that glows under ultraviolet light. Surefire Adhesive is the name of the adhesive on the AT293 closure plate tape, which the company says was developed with British Gas and is made to the PRS 10 specification; its timeline says the tape met that standard in 1996 and won a British Gas contract.

Rolls, pallets and trade fairs.

The makers in this guide sell much of their range to people who use tape and strapping at work: warehouse teams sealing cartons, packers securing pallets, contractors masking a wall or sealing a duct. Their catalogues tend to be organised around jobs and materials. Shurtape’s industrial website, for example, sorts its range by trade — construction, HVAC, packaging, marine — while IPG lists pressure-sensitive and water-activated tapes, stretch and shrink films and packaging machinery side by side.

That gives the category a recognisable set of pictures for a designer to study: rolls of tape on their cardboard cores, often stacked by colour or width; cartons running through a case sealer at the end of a packing line; steel or plastic strapping drawn tight around a loaded pallet with a hand tool or a machine; and close-ups of an adhesive face or a cut edge. Some makers, Shurtape among them, give their trade tapes short codes of letters and numbers rather than names.

The trade also meets in person. PMMI’s Pack Expo shows in the United States, interpack in Düsseldorf and FachPack in Nuremberg, which held its 2025 edition in September, gather makers of packaging materials, tapes, strapping and the machines that apply them together, and a maker’s stand there is one of the places its identity is seen at full size.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretation, not any maker’s official palette.

A family-run independent at sixty.

Advance Tapes describes itself as independent, and its timeline follows a handover of leadership. The company says Mike Ayres became chief executive in 2000 when Peter Hargrave retired, and that the same year it launched the AT6102, a polythene tape it describes as behaving like PVC. In 2012, it says, it refreshed its corporate marketing and began changing the branding across the business.

The company names Sharon Boyle as managing director from 2021, and describes staff programmes of the late 2010s — “Vision 2022” in 2018 and “We Matter” in 2019 — built around growing the business by developing its workforce. In 2024 it marked its sixtieth year in business.

Its website runs in English, French and German; its pages lead with tape types, markets and datasheets; and its trade name for stage tape, Advance GAFFA, is promoted with a short brand film. The register entry fills in the rest: Companies House lists the company’s business as other manufacturing, with its registered office at the Thurmaston site.

For a design guide, Advance Tapes shows how a mid-sized maker can build a brand from product codes, a named stage range and a founding year worn as a slogan. Compare Scapa, another English tape name with roots in industrial cloth, and Shurtape, another tape maker in this series. For this guide we use a brick red, black, silver and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Advance Tapes’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.