Hughans Saw Service

Hughans Saw Service is a 65-year-old WA business with one of the most distinctive origin stories in the trade. The company was founded in 1956 by Terence Hughan, but the lineage runs much further back, to his great-grandfather John Hughan, a British saw doctor who was shipwrecked in Flinders Bay on a voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne in 1853. John installed the saws at the first jarrah mill in 1875 and the family has been working with cutting tools in WA ever since. Today the business operates from Osborne Park, supplying tooling and precision sharpening services across professional wood, plastics, engineering, steel fabrication and food industries.

The brief was to build a reference catalogue site that worked for trade buyers across a dense, technical product range. Hughans needed a digital home that could carry the full product taxonomy, bandsaws, circular saws, coldsaws, annular cutters, drill bits, router bits, CNC tooling, lubricants, oils, wax and consumables, alongside their sharpening services, custom manufacture capability, and the Tools for Schools program. The heritage story also needed to live alongside the catalogue without overpowering it.

The structure goes deep on product navigation, with a fully expanded mega-menu covering every category and sub-category. Bandsaw blades break down into metal cutting, wood cutting, aluminium and plastic cutting, and food and paper processing. Circular saws break down into timber, aluminium and plastic, metal, and compressed fibre cement diamond tipped. Sharpening services are organised by material type. It is the kind of taxonomy that only works when you actually need it, and trade buyers do.

A distinctive feature is the Tools for Schools program, which gets its own dedicated page targeting WA secondary schools running technology and trade subjects. Custom manufacture is given equal weight, signalling to engineering clients that Hughans can make to spec rather than just supply off-the-shelf. A Pick Up and Delivery page handles the practical logistics of trade ordering across the Perth metro area.

Visually the build sits in a clean, technical palette with a strong sawblade hero motif and a partner band running through brands like ATRA Ace, Ozbroach, Toolmate, Carbitool, Sutton, Stark and Brobo. The Our Story section is the heart of the brand, telling the John Hughan shipwreck story in honest, plain language with a portrait of John himself, which gives the site a genuine sense of generational continuity that the competition cannot manufacture.

The site reads as what it is: a serious trade reference for a serious trade business. It does not try to be slick. Instead it focuses on making the product range and sharpening services easy to find, and it lets the heritage do the credibility work in the background.