A Bermuda shipping and storage firm is celebrating 60 years in business.

Bermuda Forwarders — founded as a two-strong customs clearance operation in 1955 — now has 50 full-time employees and has expanded into data storage, moving services and transport.

Nick Kempe, grandson of the late company founder Wilbert “Winky” Kempe, said: “I think he would have been pleased at the way it’s developed.

“It takes a new generation to bring in new ideas.”

He added: “We were among the first hauliers to bring in motorised trucks and the first to do consolidated ocean container freight back in the 1970s.”

We’re looking forward to the next 60 years, that would be quite a feat if we do another 60. That’s always the goal.”

He said his father, Toby, had “gone out on a limb” with plans for data storage in 1988.

“There are now three competitors in the business.”

The firm unveiled a sleek new logo recently to mark its 60th anniversary, it is a stylised variation on its traditional motifs of a globe, aeroplanes and boats. There is also a new-look website.

Mr Kempe, 32, said the firm had also bought over two other companies, Bermuda Transfer and Storage in the 1980s and Globe Forwarding in 1997, as it expanded its services.

The firm remains a family affair — in addition to Mr Kempe’s father Toby, who took over the running of the company in 1982, his mother Nancy and sister Abigail also work at its headquarters in Mills Creek, Pembroke.

Mr Kempe said Bermuda Forwarders was continuing to innovate, with a drive to upgrade its systems to make a lot of its paperwork fully electronic.

He added: “We have put money into staff training because we have modernised a lot of our processes.”

Mr Kempe said the business had been hit by the economic downturn and people leaving the Island after the recession hit in earnest around 2010.

“We’re very representative of the economy — we move people in and out. We measure the Island’s volume moving in and out and our data storage department measures the presence of international business, while our tractor-trailer business is an indication of how construction is doing and general freight measures hotel, hospitality and retail.

“The container business this year lets us know that hospital work has dried up — we are waiting for some of these big construction projects to come in.”

But he added that there appeared to be light on the economic horizon with the America’s Cup, as well as proposed large hotel projects.

Mr Kempe said: “With the America’s Cup, we’re the tip of the spear — we were moving things in even before the teams arrived and we’re certainly looking forward to the next five years more than the last five years.”

Bermuda Forwarders’ website is at www.bermudaforwarders.com