JSP Brand Guidelines: From a Hammersmith Sewing Room to an Oxfordshire Helmet Mill

A single sewing machine in a West London basement.

JSP began in West London rather than Oxfordshire. According to a June 2023 profile in the trade magazine Health & Safety Matters, Clive Johnstone founded the company in 1964 to make protective clothing, working from a base on King Street in Hammersmith, where he cut and sewed aprons and work clothing in a basement with a single sewing machine. The same magazine, marking the company’s 60th anniversary in February 2024, gives the date it was established as 11 February 1964.

The business grew quickly, the 2023 profile says. New workshop premises in Barnes made room for more sewing machinists and cutting tables, and supplied a network of outworkers. Across the road was Olympic Sound Studios, a former cinema turned recording studio, whose empty basement Johnstone rented as a warehouse; the profile recalls him wheeling finished stock across the road on a home-made trolley as the bands of the day came and went. The range widened to donkey jackets, cold-storage clothing, waterproof clothing and tarpaulins for industry, construction, the docks and the fishing trade.

In 1969 JSP left West London for the Cotswolds, moving into what the profile calls the oldest glove factory in Woodstock, a building about 600 years old. In 1972 it set up its main manufacturing site in a converted blanket mill on the River Windrush: Worsham Mill, at Minster Lovell near Witney, which remains the company’s head office.

Above the neck.

The move to Oxfordshire came with a change of trade. During the 1970s, Health & Safety Matters reports, JSP began making personal protective equipment, specialising in head, eye and face, hearing and respiratory products, alongside traffic-management products, from what had by then become five factory sites in Oxfordshire. The 1996 European PPE Directive, the profile adds, pushed companies to assess risk more formally, and JSP expanded injection moulding at Worsham Mill, with extrusion, compression, rotational and blow moulding at its other sites.

The company now describes its speciality as “above-the-neck” equipment. Its current range, as listed on its website, includes the EVO family of safety helmets, among them the EVO Alta, EVO Vista and EVO5 DualSwitch; Sonis ear defenders; the Force8 half mask and Force10 full-face mask; and the Powercap Infinity powered air respirator. It also sells Hardcap Aerolite bump caps and, in its road-safety line, traffic cones, barriers and Ridgeback speed ramps.

JSP says it runs BSI-approved test houses at all of its manufacturing sites, works under ISO 9001 quality management and the BSI Kitemark scheme, and belongs to the British Safety Industry Federation’s Registered Safety Suppliers Scheme. These are the company’s own statements about its certifications.

Two forms of outside recognition are on record. The 2023 profile reports that the research firm Frost & Sullivan, in 2014, named JSP the European market leader in industrial head protection, and that Clive Johnstone, the company’s chairman, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Safety Industry Federation at the Safety & Health Excellence Awards in 2023.

The PPE trade.

Personal protective equipment is sold on sight as much as on specification, and the makers in this guide present themselves in a shared visual language. The strongest signal is colour: fluorescent yellow and orange, the tones of high-visibility vests, jackets and rainwear, appear across catalogues, packaging and trade-show stands, usually set against a dark navy, charcoal or black.

Photography does much of the work. Catalogues and websites show safety glasses, earmuffs and hard hats on workers rather than on a white background alone: a welder behind a visor, a road crew in reflective stripes, a warehouse picker in cut-resistant gloves. Construction sites, factory floors and utility work are the usual settings, and many makers add a second, outdoor register for shooters, hunters and anglers, with camouflage, sunglasses styling and range photography.

Product pages lean on order. Gloves are shown in grids by coating, cuff and size; glasses in rows by lens tint; earplugs and earmuffs by type. Standards and ratings are printed as part of the design, in badges and code numbers, and ranges are often organised by the hazard or the trade they are sold for rather than by style alone.

The trade meets at fairs. A+A in Düsseldorf, the international trade fair for safety and health at work, gathers makers and distributors from around the world, and in the United States the National Safety Council’s Safety Congress & Expo serves a similar role. Many makers also sell through distributor networks and buying groups, so brochures, counter displays and sell sheets carry as much of the identity as the logo itself. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it is based — and attributes claims to the company where they rest on its own word.

A West London workshop turned Oxfordshire moulder.

From the late 1990s JSP kept expanding in Britain while building production abroad. Health & Safety Matters reports that it opened manufacturing facilities in China in 2000 and in the United Arab Emirates in 2001, and that its sales reached more than 95 countries during the 2000s. In 2008 the company decided to invest heavily in lean, automated manufacturing in the UK to shorten lead times; the profile says the UK Prime Minister later formally opened its robot-automated head-protection facilities at Worsham Mill.

In 2018, with sales growing in the European Union, JSP set up manufacturing in Düsseldorf, Germany, replicating its automated UK line, according to the same profile. The 2024 anniversary notice also pointed to investment in renewable energy and in production lines close to customers. It has also opened offices to serve distributors in France, Spain, Poland, the United States and China, and in 2023 it directly employed more than 450 people. Its 60th-anniversary notice in 2024 described an in-house research and development team, with manufacturing and testing bases in Oxford and across Europe. Clive Johnstone was the company’s chairman at the time of the 2023 profile.

The company also sells services around its products. Its website offers JSP Logo Express, for printing a customer’s logo on equipment, a PPE recycling service and a safety-helmet verification system, and the 2024 notice listed training courses at what JSP calls its Global Hubs and online, toolbox talks, multi-language webinars and a team of approved fit testers.

The name is easy to confuse. The old jsp.co.uk address now redirects to jspsafety.com, the company’s main site, while the same three letters are used by unrelated companies and by a web programming technology, JavaServer Pages.

For a design guide, JSP shows how a maker of helmets, masks and ear defenders can build a brand around one part of the body, with product families such as EVO and Sonis carrying the name. Compare Centurion Safety, another British safety-helmet name, and Uvex, the German safety brand. For this guide we use a mill navy, a hard-hat amber and a pale blue-grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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