Despite being a digitally led brand, The Cotswold Company’s has stepped up its investment in showrooms during recent years.
The furniture specialist opened its latest showroom in Kingston upon Thames recently, as it unveiled plans to launch its 16th store at interiors and furniture destination Redbrick, West Yorkshire.
The Kingston site marks the brand’s first showroom in London, as well as its first opening of 2026.
Meanwhile, the upcoming Redbrick store forms part of the company’s plans to “strengthen” its presence in the North of England.
Retail Gazette caught up with The Cotswold Company’s store development director Brenda Marcroft to find out more about the brand’s national expansion strategy.
What’s new with Kingston and Redbrick?
Before launching in Kingston, Marcroft admits that the business was unsure whether its customers would be any different in this London demographic, or whether there would be any difference to sales patterns.
She assures that the business hasn’t experienced this from its nearly first fortnight of trading – but notes that the most exciting part of launching a new store is “always all the different innovations”.
“It’s the things that we’re doing for the first time,” she says. “We’ve started to do lights and we put a lighting stand in. We’re starting to do curtains and curtains will go in.
“They’re all kind of things we didn’t do before and we didn’t showcase at all. I think the new product coming through is a big thing for me, and being able to see it on display. That’s the part I enjoy.”
With Redbrick, Marcroft says she’d been trying to get into the department store “for about 18 months” as she “wanted more space than everyone else had”.
Like Kingston, she notes that a large focus for the Redbrick store came down to its products, noting that the process of determining its product offering was “sort of like a miniature verison of what we do in a town or city”.
“With our Chichester store, I might walk the town and see what the competition is and what everyone else is selling,” she says.
“With Redbrick it was just the same really. It was just a case of walking through the mill three or four times to see what everyone else was doing and whether we could offer a point of difference.
“The product that goes in will have the rest of the product that’s on show in Redbrick in mind. We should be more contemporary because there’s quite a few contemporary product offers in there.”
A strengthened presence in the North
The Redbrick launch is intended to help The Cotswold Company bolster its presence in the North of England.
The exec highlights that its Knutsford store, which launched just before Christmas, has been “performing fantastically well” so far.
“That was an old bank that had been empty for absolutely years,” she says.
“It needed a massive transformation, it was just an old bank with bank vaults and dead birds everywhere. But it’s been a great building to regenerate and looks fantastic now.”
In terms of new shops in the pipeline, she revealed the business had three new stores going to the board, with two of them based in the North West. For the third, the company is exploring options for its first store in Scotland.
Injecting character into a store
Always a brand to focus on quality, Marcroft highlights that The Cotswold Company’s showrooms “evolve and improve” each time it launches a new one.
She explains that the major part of her role is selecting the sites where The Cotswold Company will open new stores.
“Site selection is a big one, because if you get it wrong, it’s really difficult to pull around,” she points out.
For its new store launches, the company has historically opted for buildings that already have a lot of “character” such as old banks or churches, which are “normally all listed buildings”.
However, Marcroft says that its Chichester store launch in December 2025 “opened the gates” to new store formats it could try in the future.
“With Chichester it was an empty box with no character. It was an old Hobbycraft. So that was a trial to say going forward, could we take a building without any character and inject character into it?”
“I think that will now make a difference going forward of what we can do and what we can start with,” she says.
In its announcement of its Redbrick launch plans, The Cotswold Company CEO Ralph Tucker insisted that the business was well on its way to becoming “one of the most-loved furniture and homeware brands in the country”.
Aside from launching new stores, Marcroft highlights that Tucker plays a key role in helping the company achieve this.
“He’s very customer focused” she says. “If someone writes or tries to speak to him directly, he will always speak to them. He’s in stores a lot, he likes to be able to talk to customers directly.
“He could get someone just writing and saying their delivery was two hours late and he will always answer. He’s always very direct.”
It’s an attitude which is reflected in the brand’s company value of “constantly caring” for its customers and teams, to ensure its “products and services meet their needs”.
And of course, the quality of its products and services is also a value The Cotswold Company holds in high regard.
Marcroft reaffirms this sentiment: “We are moving on with stores but it’s always been about quality rather than quantity and I think we’ll stay like that.
“But at the moment there are quite a lot of opportunities coming through, so we’ll still be growing on the physical side going forward.”
