How The Belfield Group’s sofas bring people and comfort together
As a white label and branded manufacturer, The Belfield Group (Belfield) makes many of the sofas, armchairs, mattresses, and bedding systems sold by the UK’s largest retailers. Furthermore, the group caters to the needs of the leisure market with a wide range of soft furnishings, as well as curtains and beds for caravans, motorhomes, and lodges, which are supplied to the UK’s top leisure retailers, caravan parks, and holiday villages. From its furniture designers and fabric specialists, through to its skilled craftsmen and machinists, Belfield employs and develops some of the most talented and skilled people in the industry. To gain a better understanding of the group and its divisions, Tom Prestwich, Chief Executive Officer, joins us for an informative interview.
“Encompassing four companies, Belfield is a private equity-backed business that was formed in 2004 by bringing together several upholstery businesses,” he
begins. “Initially, we brought together Belfield Furnishings – a business with a strong heritage and a market leader in the leisure furniture industry – and Westbridge Furniture Designs (Westbridge), which has an incredibly strong presence in the white label furniture market, manufacturing sofas and chairs for major high street retailers like John Lewis, Argos, and Dunelm. In 2016, NorthEdge Capital backed a management buyout of the business and subsequently funded two bolt-on acquisitions. In 2017, Belfield acquired Tetrad, a manufacturer of high-end, handcrafted products sitting at the top end of the UK’s upholstery offering. This was a key strategic acquisition which complemented the existing upholstery offering.
“Three years later, we acquired Clinchplain, a foam converting business that supplies the upholstery market with foam and fiber components. It was a logical step to add a foam-converting business to the group as part of our vertical integration efforts to service all three of our business units, as well as a strong trade orderbook. Each of our businesses operates from its own facilities, with Tetrad and Clinchplain based in Lancashire, Belfield Furnishings in Derbyshire, and Westbridge operating in North Wales with two factories. Additionally, we have two facilities in Romania that make cut-and-sewn covers for our Westbridge business.”
Responsible manufacturing
In an effort to make its sofas easier to recycle and manufacture, Belfield has developed a new technology, known as Clip. “Clip is the opportunity for us to get ahead of the upholstery market and our competitors by offering a solution that does not require a conventionally upholstered manufacturing methodology. In upholstery, investment in machinery is limited as assembly can only be done by skilled individuals such as frame assemblers and upholsterers. Every week, we manufacture 2500 sofas that are going into homes, the majority of which are replacing an old sofa destined for incineration, or even worse, landfill. The problem is that conventional sofas currently cannot be recycled, and considering that we fabricate 2500 units a week, this results in a substantial number of unrecyclable sofas being discarded. When we developed Clip, our plan was to address this issue.
“The benefits of our Clip technology are twofold. Firstly, it allows the piece of furniture to be completely dismantled into its constituent parts, most of which can be recycled. Secondly, with upholstery being a rare skill, it helps mitigate the impact of the skill shortage we face in the industry, something that has been exacerbated since Brexit. Currently, following the cost-of-living crisis and high inflation, the UK upholstery market is depressed. However, as the market begins to recover with increasing consumer confidence and focus on deferred luxury purchases, recruiting large numbers of skilled people could prove to be a barrier to growth. Clip enables us to manufacture sofas in a way which can be taught relatively quickly and will therefore play an important role in helping us scale the business. While Clip will never replace conventional upholstery, it gives us another string to our bow.
“Moreover, we look forward to the day when extended producer responsibility (EPR) becomes a reality in the UK furniture market, empowering us to get ahead of the curve by offering a product that addresses the sustainability issues at its core. Indeed, a conventionally upholstered product may not tick all the sustainability boxes, but Clip is a big step in the right direction,” Tom informs.
Employee engagement
Evidently, skilled labor is essential to any upholstery business. Hence, Belfield strives to take great care of its workforce, ensuring they feel valued and empowered. “As a people-driven business, it is important for us to ensure that our employees are motivated, engaged, and feel valued. To achieve this, we’ve worked tirelessly to improve employee communication and feedback. With a large workforce, this is quite an undertaking, but using regular ‘roadshows’, we aim to meet every single employee in groups of 30-to-70 people, giving them a good opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback. In those meetings, we take them through the financial performance of the business as we strive to be open and transparent. This puts context around the decisions of the leadership team and has been well received by the wider team.
“Last year, we officialized our purpose and corporate values in an effort to engage our workforce. Our purpose is simply to ‘bring people together’, not only through internal collaboration, but also through our products. A sofa is a major purchase as it plays a crucial part in everyone’s home lives, bringing friends, partners, and families together, providing a place to sit and gather. We feel privileged to manufacture high-quality, British-made products, and this is our sense of purpose” he ends.