Our Story

The company was named after the car Andrew Doyle dreamed of owning. The American Cadillac Fleetwood. It stood for everything he believed in: peerless quality, innovative engineering and eye-catching design.

It is a spirit of craftsmanship and the bond of family that make Fleetwood what it is today. A business that strives for quality and authenticity with a keen sense of its past and an eye on the future. Three generations of the Doyle family have worked hard to produce exceptional paint.

When you buy a can of Fleetwood paint, you can be sure it comes direct from our family to yours.

“I personally vet every new product. It doesn’t get the Fleetwood name unless it’s of the highest quality” – Conor M. Doyle

Our company began, however, not with paint but with brushes. In 1950, Andrew Doyle would cycle into the city with his two young sons to collect offcuts of tin metal from the Jacob’s biscuit factory. In little more than a shed behind the family home in Clontarf in Dublin, the scrap metal was shaped into ferrules, the bands that hold brush bristles in place.

From ferrules came brushes – initially for artists, then cosmetic brushes bought by the likes of Max Factor, and finally paint brushes, which we still make today.

In the early days, the bristles were made from the finest horsehair and paired with elegant wooden handles. Later, ensuring the bristles stayed in place was integral to Fleetwood’s early success. Every day Conor Doyle would get samples of the production from the previous day and would check one box of every lot. He would then ‘flirt’ the brushes – the traditional term for fanning the bristles. If any were to fall out the supervisor was called…

Fleetwood was one of the first companies in Ireland investing extensively in research and development, taking the then unusual step in 1965 of hiring a chemist to develop new fillers and wallpaper adhesive. The result was a paste that would – according to advertisements of the time – ‘stays stuck when others give up’.

Exports were growing too and in the early seventies we opened a manufacturing plant outside Kingston, Jamaica. Brian Kavanagh Senior set up the factory and was later run by Tom O’Connell, both much-loved characters who became firm friends with hardware store owners across the Caribbean, as well as the region’s famous rum shops!

Soon after, Fleetwood became something of a household name in Ireland – thanks to an infectiously catchy radio jingle many still remember to this day. Sat around an office desk, Conor Doyle and ad man Bob McCabe worked on variations of an advertising slogan that would eventually lodge in the heads of an entire generation and remain in the top ten of ad jingles in Ireland for decades to come. Mention Fleetwood to anyone over 30 and they’ll probably sing a variation of this…

Various iterations of the advertisement ran for years. There was even a Hollywood version that was very much of its time. It asked if Fleetwood would paint Sharon Stone’s boudoir pink to match her basic instinct. Apparently, the answer was yes. Fleetwood would.

The success of the home-grown slogan exemplifies the Fleetwood philosophy. That is has been, and always should be, a family business with teams working together in an environment where technology assists rather than manages.

Fleetwood has made paint for brands such as Tesco and Dunnes Stores and was among the first to design a transparent container which allowed customers to see the colour more precisely. We also formulated one of the first ‘hint of…’ palettes that were a staple of the decade’s decorating boom.

Our paint has been used in many notable buildings, including Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel, the Mansion House, the gates of the President’s residence, Áras an Uachtaráin, and the Royal College of Surgeons.

There have been notable collaborations over the years. In 2013 Fleetwood launched its Popular Colours collection, a partnership with leading Irish interior designers to curate a modern palette of interior colours. It would go on to become the most popular colour collection in Ireland.

In 2007 we worked with Jeff Banks, presenter of TV’s The Clothes Show, who was partial to regular mugs of hot chocolate whenever he visited the offices. The innovative multi-surface range was called Lazy Paint and could be used on everything from walls to metal to wood.

A sense of place is key to the Fleetwood story, too, and our team has always been acutely aware of the impact of what we do on the natural environment around us. All Fleetwood paint is made here in Ireland and we were ahead of the zeitgeist in caring for the environment around us: the water, the lakes, the nature and landscape around us.

Conor Doyle was passionate about the environment before it was fashionable. Fleetwood’s site in County Cavan was chosen for its peaceful setting and its proximity to the beautiful Lough Ramor. Conor planted acres of ash forest on the Virginia site and his legacy lives on. Today, a team of eight Fleetwood volunteers follow in his footsteps by continuing to plant around the site and meadows have been created for staff and wildlife to enjoy. The volunteers even do what they can to encourage a rare protected plant species, the Yellow Rattle.

Stan Buckley, as Managing Director, has continued Conor’s legacy and is responsible for the development, modernisation and continued expansion of our world-class manufacturing business, including ensuring environmental concerns remain at the top of the agenda. It is a Fleetwood aim to make everything we touch just that little bit better and Stan expertly guides this process.