Swindon success story Oak Furniture Land is to enter the highly-competitive sofa business with a new retail brand called SofaStore, it revealed today.
Already the UK’s fastest-growing furniture retailer, Oak Furniture Land will launch SofaStore on Boxing Day across its 57 UK showrooms, including four dedicated stores. 
The new brand will sit alongside that of the core Oak Furniture Land business. It is the first time in the UK that a sofa retailer has been launched with a national network of showrooms.
A TV advertising campaign has already started backed by a dedicated website for the brand, which sets Oak Furniture Land against major discount sofa retailers such as DFS and Sofaworks.
The immediate post-Christmas period is a prime sales time for sofa firms, traditionally backed by heavy TV advertising. Oak Furniture Land today said it would lead the market with shorter delivery times and pricing that is “more transparent”.
Oak Furniture Land, which has its head office and main distribution warehouse at South Marston, has trialled sofas in its Oak Furniture Land stores for the past two years.
Positive customer feedback has prompted the high-growth firm to stage a nationwide roll-out out of the new sofa brand, which will carry up to 90 ranges and 4,000 variations of its sofas, including between five and 12 colours for each product.
As well as the four dedicated SofaStore outlets in Rotherham, Croydon, Glasgow and Farnham, the range will be sold in dedicated sections of its Oak Furniture Land retail park stores across the UK, which have a combined 1m sq ft of retail space.
The firm today said its stores will be able to deliver to customers within 14 days, compared to a typical wait of up to three months. It claims its pricing will be easier to understand, including free delivery and items like scatter cushions as standard.
The launch comes a week after Oak Furniture Land was ranked 37th in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100, which showcases the private firms with fastest-growing sales over a three-year period. It is for the fifth time in six years the firm has appeared in the respected table.
Oak Furniture Land, often hailed as one of the UK’s clicks-to-bricks retail success stories, has grown sales from £35m in 2010 to £194m this year.
The firm was launched in 2006 by managing director Jason Bannister, who sold his first consignment of imported furniture on eBay.
Since then it has enjoyed significant expansion with year-on-year growth of 40%-plus. It now employs 1,000 people across the UK and at South Marston, where it operates a 300,000 sq ft warehouse and distribution centre. In the past 12 months it has opened new stores at the rate of one a month.
Mr Bannister said today: “Our approach at Oak Furniture Land has been very successful, selling quality products at a great price, taking a multichannel approach, allowing customers to get their orders quickly and with free delivery.
“Now we are applying this to sofas, and I’m excited about the SofaStore launch and our growth plans.”
