A Cotswold soap-maker, a Warwickshire 3D-printing pioneer supplying supercar manufacturers, and an Edinburgh tech-refurbishment social enterprise are among 186 organisations honoured this year with The King’s Awards for Enterprise, as Britain’s most prestigious business accolade marks its 60th anniversary.
The 2026 cohort includes 76 winners for international trade, 52 for innovation, 36 for sustainability, and 22 for promoting opportunity through social mobility. The awards, first presented by Queen Elizabeth II in 1966 and renamed in 2022 following the King’s accession, have now recognised more than 8,000 British businesses across six decades.
A sustainability story written in soap
For Emma Heathcote-James, founder of the Little Soap Company, the recognition vindicates an approach that has prized principles over margins since she began hand-crafting bars from her Cotswold cottage in 2008.
“We don’t make the profit that we perhaps could if we made everything in China, but every single decision that we make is putting the planet and people first,” said Heathcote-James, 49, whose products are now stocked by Waitrose, Tesco, and Boots.
The business turns over around £2.4 million and employs 13 staff, manufacturing exclusively in Scotland and northern England, home to the few soap factories Britain has left. It produces vegan-certified, cruelty-free ranges in recycled packaging.
Chief operating officer Sharon Redrobe said geopolitical tensions had pushed up the cost of raw materials including essential oils used as fragrances. Winning as a small, independently financed business was the company’s “biggest coup” to date.
“It’s really important that we can demonstrate you can have a successful business and still do things correctly from the start,” Heathcote-James said.
From a mother’s garage to the supercar grid
In Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, RYSE 3D has secured an international trade award after export orders rose by 2,300 per cent to £2.24 million over three years. The company manufactures high-performance 3D-printed parts for more than 20 of the world’s leading supercar marques.
Founder Mitchell Barnes, 29, started developing a 3D printer in his mother’s garage as an undergraduate, using his student loan to build the first prototype. He is among the youngest ever recipients and has now collected a second King’s Award in as many years, having won his first at 27.
“It’s a royal honour,” Barnes said. “You don’t believe it when you first get it, but then winning two is even more insane.”
The business employs 25 people, exporting principally to Latvia, Denmark, and the United States. Although the tariff regime introduced by Washington last year has eaten into US returns, healthy margins have allowed RYSE 3D to absorb some of the impact.
To address a chronic skills shortage, the company has recruited from outside the sector, training former coffee baristas as 3D printing engineers. Barnes plans to open offices on both the east and west coasts of the United States before the end of 2026.
Refurbishing devices, repairing communities
Edinburgh Remakery, a ten-strong social enterprise honoured in the sustainability category, refurbishes and resells used technology, donating devices to people experiencing digital exclusion and routing unsalvageable components to specialist processors including the Royal Mint, which extracts gold from old motherboards.
Chief executive Elaine Brown said the team had been overwhelmed when the news arrived: “There was much jumping up and down in the remakery that day and a few more cakes were had just to celebrate.”
Demand has surged as businesses retire PCs ahead of the end of support for Windows 10. “Being a business for good has been good for business,” she said. “We’ve grown our turnover, we’ve grown our engagement, and the King’s Award is the icing on the cake.”
Serial entrepreneur Will Fletcher, 46, who oversaw the promoting opportunity category as a judge, said the assessment was deliberately rigorous. “It’s a really, really thorough process. You always get a few that are out-and-out winners, and then there’s a few really tough cases.”
The category rewards profitable companies that channel resources back into their communities. His former business, Recycling Lives, won the award four times, including in 2019 for supporting ex-offenders into employment, where reoffending rates among participants ran at less than 5 per cent against a national average of around two-thirds. Fletcher now runs Car.co.uk, a Lancashire-based digital car-buying platform, which itself takes home a 2026 award for innovation.
Taken together, this year’s roll call suggests British SMEs continue to find competitive advantage not in spite of their values, but because of them.