Interview: Reimagining the furniture experience
Having decided the antiquated furniture industry needed a bit of a shake-up Keiran Hewkin found the only way to ultimately bring about change was by striking out on his own and founding the disruptor Swyft.
The company has recently opened its first physical store, in London, and The Retail Bulletin paid a visit to hear about the creation of the business from Hewkin who reveals he had not intended to venture into the furniture industry.
Beginning with manufacturing
He had been interested in manufacturing – working on production lines making glass sheeting for trucks and in the petro-chemical industry – but when he had a desire to move to London (to drink beer with his mates) his aim of remaining in manufacturing meant he needed to choose between furniture and food.
Subscribe to TRB“I thought, ‘how hard can furniture be?’” he says, before he went on to take a job at the Sofa & Chair Company in the west of the capital. While running three factories for this B2B firm he developed the idea for Swyft that sought to address the painfully long time-frame of two months it typically took for customers to receive a new sofa. “The work time was only eight hours (to build) so why did it take two months to get it to the customer?”
He found the issue was mainly down to scheduling in the order book and he believed there was surely some way to benefit from this scenario by creating an alternative, customer-centric proposition. “The idea was to have the parts [in stock], get the fabric, and then make it the next day so you could get it out in a total of a week. This was my ‘seven-day sofa’ idea that I took to the board at the Sofa & Chair Company. The board thought it a great idea, the investors agreed, but the founder thought it was a bad idea.”
Re-organising the furniture industry
With a belief the industry could be re-organised, combined with his young mid-twenties age and no dependents, he decided to leave his employer and seek to prove his idea. Initially he started a bespoke furniture business working on ad-hoc projects and interior design work in order to build up his capabilities and contacts ahead of launching Swyft.
The original idea was to sell this concept to retailers as a white label, delivery in seven days proposition, to complement their existing offerings. But there was almost universal rejection and so Hewkin had no alternative but to go to the market directly with a DTC launch in 2019 once he had quickly knocked up the Swyft branding.
The timing, mere months ahead of Covid-19, had the upside of fuelling the online-only business’s sales but the issue was having the manufacturing facility based in Portugal, where he had built up many industry contacts, because cross-border trade and having employees working in the factory during the pandemic were major challenges.
Onto a winner
Despite the headaches he knew he was onto a winner very quickly because when the website was in a test environment an order was placed for a sofa. “We did not even have the factory rigged up. It was just one sofa and seven fabrics available at the time. We very quickly scaled the business in order to take the Covid sales [boost],”he says.
The fundamental design of the sofas – and the business model – was determined by working backwards from an objective of delivering a sofa next day anywhere in the UK. This prompted the decision to pack the sofas in various manageably-sized boxes and for the various parts to fit together as simplistically as Lego.
Customers are given a choice of delivery days, which Hewkin says is unusual in the furniture industry as the traditional practice is to wait until sufficient orders can be pooled together and deliveries then undertaken in the most economical way for the retailer. “If we take 100 orders then they could be on 100 different days. We use our own fleet of vans in London and AIT (two-man delivery service) for elsewhere,” he explains.
Moving outside the core
Hewkin says focusing purely on sofas stood the company well for the first four years – with year one sales reaching £3 million, then £12 million, and £15 million in year three. This year’s revenues are due to hit £32 million, helped by a broader range of products that started in 2024 when a dining table and chairs was added to the mix. “It was a big test for us moving outside our core category and today non-sofa sales are 20% of revenues,” he says.
What has made a major contribution over the years are sofa beds that today represent 50% of sales and the model 4 was the best-selling product until model 8 appeared and now this is the best-seller across all the Swyft ranges. Hewkin puts this down to the company having half of its sales generated within the M25 where there is pressure to maximise space within many households.
Although the business had been initially rebuffed by retailers, six months after its launch John Lewis “gave us a shot” with a branded concession in 15 stores and this currently accounts for 8% of total Swyft sales and is growing, he says.
This had been the only physical presence for Swyft until the opening of its first store near Angel in North London that swung open its doors in late October. It was prompted by the knowledge that 60% of furniture sales are derived offline: “Our number one query each week from Live Chat is ‘where can I see your products?’ We analysed the data and found the N1 postcode was the best for a store. This is where we’d sent out most swatches.”
The store showcases the Swyft range within which the average price of a sofa is £1,400+VAT but this is certainly a manageable figure, according to Hewkin, who says the typical customer is “resilient”. This is undoubtedly helped by them having an average income of £140,000 and also likely to have enjoyed wage increases of 7/8% over the past two years. This has helped the company achieve 30% year-on-year sales growth in 2025, which follows a tougher time back in 2023 when Hewkin admits that Swyft had its worst year, with growth of only a modest 8%.
Disciplined ranging
What has also helped the business is a disciplined approach to its range whereby it does not suffer from having a long tail of slower-selling items. As much as 20% of the range is cut every quarter, which could be certain fabrics or an actual item. Meanwhile, 20% new items are introduced each quarter with “everything given a chance” to establish itself before hard sales number determine whether it has earned its keep on the shelves.
Hewkin acknowledges that a failure to maintain this strict discipline would be a major issue for the business in the future. He is far less focused on what his rivals are up to: “No time is spent looking at the competition. I don’t worry about what other people do. If we can see it then they’ve probably already moved on.”
