‘What are you going to do next?’ I was asked after we sold our previous business, I’m thinking about starting a furniture company’. My wife had studied interior design at university and I had experience in sales management and spray painting. It seemed to make sense.

On a shoestring budget and without debt, envy furniture came into being. Building a successful business is typically done by trial & error and knowing little about the furniture business forced us to try & find new approaches to a retail furniture business.

In the beginning, like most furniture retailers we sold imported pre-finished furniture products supplied from two or three of the major wholesale furniture/giftware companies and found the only way to compete was on price.

Everyone was selling exactly the same products sourced from the same wholesalers. After discovering quite quickly that the wholesalers also had retail websites and shops of their own, we couldn’t compete and had to have a rethink or we would be out of business pretty quick.

‘I really like that table’, said a customer one day ‘do you have it in any other colour?’ ‘Or is it just in white?’ ‘Just in the white’ I said and the sale was gone.

‘Just when things seemed darkest, a deceptively simple idea presented itself.’

Thinking back on the previous day and the lost sale of the white painted table, it dawned, the clouds parted, I had my eureka moment! ‘Let’s offer the customers exactly what they want’; a pink table, a purple chest of drawers, a chair upholstered in their chosen fabric, no problem.

‘Our passion is to produce quality furniture that is different to what others have to offer, furniture that is unique and loved by you.’

Today, envy furniture has long-term business relationships with just a few trusted suppliers offering bespoke finished furniture products to both the domestic and commercial sectors winning praise from customers and furniture industry experts alike.