This cutlery and silverware firm was launched in 1989. The owner and managing director is Yorkshire-born Chris Hudson, who after serving as an officer in the merchant navy and working abroad for several years, returned to Sheffield to take control of his maternal family’s silverware business. Chimo (a Canadian Innuit word of greeting and friendship) occupied the old factory of Gee & Holmes in Eyre Lane (which was renamed White Rose Works).  According to one account: ‘Here, in a modest two-storey brick building, Chimo Holdings remains one of Sheffield’s few cutlery manufacturers.  Its premises are not packed with hundreds of cutlers.  Rather, it’s a meandering web of small “shops” where each specialist works away at his craft, whether it’s grinding, buffing, engraving, cutting or gilding’ (Rachael Clegg, Sheffield Star, 2 August 2011).  

Chimo owned the names and marks of two Sheffield silver manufacturers – William Yates and Walter Trickett – and marketed silver-plated table cutlery and giftware.  By 2012, it had a team of sixteen people, who were busy supplying limited edition Olympic Games spoons and salad servers (Sheffield Star, 19 June 2012).  In 2016, the assets, machinery, tools, and dies of two Birmingham giftware and regalia manufacturers – F. C. Parry Ltd and C. Robothan & Sons Ltd – were acquired and transferred to the Sheffield factory.  Three years later, the Eyre Lane site was sold for student flats development and White Rose Works relocated to 137 Carlisle Street, Sheffield. With the help of a £10,000 Covid-19 government grant, Chris Hudson completed the move only weeks before the start of the pandemic ‘lockdown’.

The factory continues to specialise in the production of traditional cutlery in sterling silver, silver-plate, and stainless steel. The main customers are department stores, hotels, restaurants,  and livery companies, with over 40 per cent of products exported. Chimo also has a knife ‘hospital’ for repairing, refurbishing, re-plating, and re-sharpening knives. Chris Hudson was appointed MBE in 2018 and Master Pewterer two years later.