The business was established when a former cloth mill, known as
Avon Mill, on the banks of the
River Avon at
Limpley Stoke in Wiltshire, was acquired by Messrs E G Browne and J C Margetson in 1885. The previous owners of the site had been timber merchants but had diversified into rubber goods. label markings By 1890, the business had transferred to premises in Melksham and was named
The Avon India Rubber Company Limited. In June 1958, an advertisement appeared in the
British Sub-Aqua Club journal
Triton to publicise the "Typhoon
dry diving suit manufactured by the Avon India Rubber Co. Ltd. exclusively for
E. T. Skinner Co. Ltd.". For many years, Avon Rubber also produced back-entry dry diving suits for military use. The company also moulded lined "Stonehenge" brand
Wellington boots at a time when such footwear was manufactured by calendering or dipping processes. Production started on a range of inflatable boats in 1959. In 1997 the Avon Tyres business was sold to
Cooper Tire & Rubber Company of
Findlay,
Ohio in the United States, leaving the company to concentrate on its core businesses of automotive components, technical products and protective equipment. In March 2000, Avon moved its activities to a manufacturing and head office facility at Hampton Park West, south of
Melksham. made by Avon Technologies In June 2005, Avon purchased International Safety Instruments, Inc., based in
Lawrenceville, Georgia, USA. Avon-ISI is a manufacturer of
self-contained breathing apparatus and
thermal imaging systems for fire, law enforcement and industrial applications. In August 2006, the Avon Automotive division was sold to a US-based management team and became a separate entity called Avon Automotive Holdings Inc.; this was the largest buy-out in the company's history. The aerosol division was sold for £1.75 million in March 2008 to Avon Group (an unrelated Bristol-based company), enabling Avon Rubber to concentrate on its core protective equipment, dairy and extrusions markets. In November 2008, the mixing plant at
Westbury was sold to ATR Compounding Ltd, a division of SPC UK, a compounder of rubber based in Whitby. The company, which had a long history of manufacturing respirators – including the
S6 NBC Respirator, a
gas mask used by the British armed forces from the 1960s, and the
S10 from the 1980s – began to supply the
M50 mask to United States forces in 2009. In January 2020, Avon purchased
Ceradyne, Inc.'s advanced ballistic protection business and the Ceradyne brand from
3M. In September 2020, the company divested its milking equipment business, milkrite | InterPuls, to
DeLaval for net proceeds of around £160 million. This enabled the company to concentrate on personal protection, both respiratory and ballistic, under the Avon Protection brand. Shortly after, they acquired Team Wendy, a maker of helmets for military and first responder use, for a reported $130million. The company changed its name from Avon Rubber to
Avon Protection in July 2021. In December 2021, the company announced it would be closing its body armour business after its bullet-proof vests failed US regulatory tests. In April 2022 the company warned that the year's profits would miss City forecasts, leading to a share price drop of nearly 20 per cent over the course of a single day. In August 2024 the company changed its name from Avon Protection to
Avon Technologies. In June 2025 the company was awarded a £10.2 million order from the Ministry of Defence to supply its NATO-standard FM50 respirators for Ukraine. == Notable people ==