Five men in the Northamptonshire village of Wollaston banded together in 1881 to form a worker-owned cooperative, the Northamptonshire Productive Society, or NPS, securing early stability through a government contract to make army boots. By 1899 the growing company had moved into a purpose-built factory on South Street that it still operates from today. In 1960, NPS partnered with Griggs to pair a Solovair sole with a Griggs upper, producing the first Dr. Martens boot, and continued making them under license until the mid-1990s before launching Solovair as its own independent brand in 1994; Ivor Tilley bought the company in 2006 with backing from its own workers.