From the high street to employee ownership: the Forest story

Forest Contract is the hospitality side of Forest Sofa, which makes upholstered furniture by hand in two factories, in Salford and Blackburn. This is how the business got here, drawing on a talk Ryan Mohieddin, then managing director, gave in 2021 on the Made Smarter leadership programme with Manchester Metropolitan University.

The 1990s: the high street shrinks

In the 1990s British upholstery was built on mass production and a short list of designs, sold through high street chains. As imports grew, many UK makers struggled to compete, and several of the chains that sold British sofas closed altogether. Forest needed new ways to reach its customers.

2004: online, with The Chesterfield Company

Forest Sofa Ltd was formed in 2004, the year it launched The Chesterfield Company, a website for leather Chesterfield sofas and chairs. Few furniture makers sold online then, so advertising cost little, but buyers were still wary of ordering a sofa on the internet.

2007: Forest Contract

As the high street kept shrinking, the business needed to diversify further. Its designs were developed to meet commercial standards, and a new division was set up to furnish UK hospitality and leisure: Forest Contract, with its own website, in 2007. It now furnishes hotels, pubs, restaurants, cafés, golf and sports clubs, schools and holiday parks across the UK and Ireland, and you can see many of them on our projects map.

2010 to 2015: new brands, beds and a second factory

• 2010: a digital reboot. New advertising platforms seemed to appear every few months, so we invested in digital skills, including a master's in digital marketing with Manchester Metropolitan University, and put data at the centre: search, testing, design for mobile, video, social media, reviews and content.
• 2011: The English Sofa Company, an online brand of contemporary sofas for the home.
• 2012: beds, and Blackburn. We took on a bed maker in Blackburn that had gone into administration, which brought its customers, a second factory and a whole new range of beds into the business.
• 2014: The English Bed Company, selling those beds direct to the public.
• 2015: a bigger Blackburn factory. Nearly 2,000 square metres, with 17 new jobs filled by local people: frame makers, sewers, a wood machinist, upholsterers, and production and sales staff.

Two factories and 100,000 variations

Our main factory and showroom is Newbury House in Salford: about 3,200 square metres where frames are built, fabric and leather are cut and sewn, and every piece is upholstered by hand, with the sales and design teams under the same roof. Blackburn makes about a quarter of what we produce.

The range has grown from leather Chesterfields to contemporary sofas, sofa beds, beds, headboards and mattresses, and, for hospitality, banquettes, tub chairs and footstools, alongside the chairs and tables we supply. Our development upholsterers design new pieces and adapt existing ones to a customer's brief. With every size, fabric and finish, that adds up to around 100,000 product variations, so in 2017 the work moved onto one business system: slow, manual jobs were automated, information that one or two people used to hold was open to the whole team, and tasks that took hours took minutes.

2019: a management buy-out

Ryan Mohieddin joined Forest in the early 2000s, working in sales and marketing before becoming sales director and, in 2017, managing director. In December 2019 he bought the business from its owner, Dave Foster, in a management buy-out.

2021: a digital roadmap for the workshop

On the Made Smarter programme in 2021 we set out a three-year plan for the workshop: digitising our paper patterns and keeping a safe copy off site, software that fits pattern pieces together to waste less fabric, a plotter and then computer-controlled cutting, barcode tracking of work in progress, and photo records of quality checks.

2022: a new managing director

Nick Shepherd, who joined Forest in 2013 and became finance director in 2020, was appointed managing director in 2022, and Ryan became chairman.

2024: owned by the people who work here

On 27 September 2024 Ryan sold Forest Sofa to an employee ownership trust, which holds the business on behalf of everyone who works here. Ryan remains chairman and sits on the trust's board with Nick.

The team today

Nick Shepherd is managing director, and Ryan Mohieddin is chairman and an employee ownership trustee. Adam Davidson, our group sales manager, looks after contract and retail sales. Many of the team have been with us for years, some, like Chris Allen, since they joined as apprentices.

What hasn't changed

Our aim, as we put it in 2021, is to turn houses into homes, and commercial buildings into destination venues, combining traditional upholstery with digital tools. Our values spell LEAD: learn, evolve, adapt and develop. And every sofa, bed, headboard and banquette is still made by hand in our own workshops. How we work.