Comment by BVAA CEO Rob Bartlett

Today we celebrate the 100^th edition of our hugely respected Valveuser Magazine!

One of the first things I was alerted to on joining BVAA, was the dominance in the market of certain publications, who a number of our members thought were pillaging the valve community.  

Until then, BVAA’s response had been a rather feeble A3-folded newsletter, quixotically sent almost exclusively to our own members. 

Back then BVAA wasn’t the broad, supply-chain based organization of today – our tiny membership at that time were all manufacturers and largely competitors, so this did seem rather a naive approach.  It was also completely ignoring our most important stakeholders – our industry’s customers.

We very quickly go onto sorting out this issue, and ‘Valveuser’ was born - and deliberately named to reflect the new targeted readership.

We laid down some strict criteria: -

• our magazine was always going to be exclusive to members and our business partners,
• it would be regarded as ‘a service, not a profit centre,’
• and members’ PR material would be featured completely free of charge. 

Advertising would be carried, but for most of the magazine’s existence this has been at less than the cost of delivery.

Issue One had an industry legend on the front cover, we increased the content 6-fold straight of the bat, and boosted the advertising revenue substantially.  We even featured the first of many BVAA ‘Hatters’ stories. 

We’ve come a long way since. Our most recent hard copy of Valveuser was a massive 128 pages, twice the size of other, similar publications.

Over the 100 issues we’ve gone through substantial improvements in design and layout, the content and features, the challenge of Covid leading to the introduction of digital issues with all that media’s special advantages, a truly dramatic increase in the number of UK businesses featured, and most importantly a colossal increase in the targeted readership, which is now truly global.

In our national game, Cricket, it is traditional for a batter to modestly raise one’s bat on reaching 100 to acknowledge their achievement. Everyone who’s ever been involved with Valveuser magazine, and especially our current production team, should raise their metaphorical bat - it’s been a truly splendid effort!

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