About Us

AMS International is a family-owned business based in Tuxford, Nottinghamshire, England and is the only toothbrush manufacturer in the UK. It is a company founded on a spirit of innovation and engineering excellence developed by the Sanderson family over several generations.

AMS International specialises in the manufacture and supply of all products for Oral Health Promotion in schools and nurseries, including toothbrushes, toothpaste and accessories. We have created highly automated manufacturing processes to ensure the highest quality and reasonable prices. We continue to invent and innovate on our quest to achieve greater sustainability and customer satisfaction.

In the censuses of 1821 to 1881 members of the Sanderson family of Bradfield, a small village on the moors north West of Sheffield, were noted as “filemakers”.

Filemaking was a cottage industry which fed the factories of Sheffield. It involved taking flat blanks from the factory and painstakingly cutting parallel and then diagonal grooves into them with a hammer and chisel. The prepared files were then hardened ready for use.

This work was done along with farming at Fair House in High Bradfield.

With the advent of the internal combustion engine and the motor car in the last years of the Nineteenth Century, Louis William Sanderson began to think of engineering and in particular motor cars. In 1909 Louis had set up in Sheffield as a motor engineer.

After the First World War in 1919, Louis Sanderson moved with his three sons and daughter to Tuxford in Nottinghamshire to set up a garage at the junction of the A1 Great North Road and the A57 Liverpool to Lincoln road.

In 1946 sons Louis and Arthur set up a business to service and sell tractors in a former farm in Tuxford. Louis returned to the car garage in the late 1950s.

About Tuxford

Tuxford was a centre for the railways; once having no less than four stations and a locomotive and wagon repair works.

Other engineering industry included the building of tunnelling and coal cutting machinery for the coal mines which were a major employer in the area.

In the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries the orchards of Tuxford sent Victoria plums by train to Covent Garden market.

It has remained a centre for transport and construction, with many small and medium sized companies. Farming remains a major part of the local economy, along with energy generation in all its forms, and services.

Louis Sanderson had several patents including an apparatus to collect oil from the surface of the sea and a post collision restrainer alternative to the air bag. In the late 1960s he noticed that his children were not cleaning their teeth after school lunches and invented and patented a self-contained toothbrush with a liquid paste in the handle for use at school.

In 1981 his sons William and John began to make and market a toothbrush based on this invention. The business expanded into supplying tens of millions of own label toothbrushes to supermarkets in the UK, France, Germany and the USA.