Don’t be surprised if 2026 is the year that etailers increasingly make physical store debuts or expansions, following the likes of Swyft, Sofa Club and Love Your Home. ‘The businesses that have been digital first have taken a while to mature to the point in which they’re butting up against the sides of the ecommerce market. Businesses in the most part need to grow in to be healthy. And when you come up against some limitations on that growth, you start looking elsewhere,’ says Keiran Hewkin, Swyft ceo.
Originally an upholstery etailer, cabinet and rugs now account for a fifth of sales, and outdoor furniture was added to the mix as Swyft celebrated its sixth birthday on 15 December.
‘You will see a lot more physical stores, as that cohort of businesses matures and realises there is a limit to how much discovery can be done by customers. Online is great for transactions, fantastic for ease, but it’s not great for discovery – eventually everyone gets that same realisation. Especially with something as tactile as furniture that you just want to touch and feel.’
Some Swyft customers have had the opportunity to do that through concessions in John Lewis since 2021, but there was no Swyft store until October when Islington, north London saw the launch of Store 01. ‘I was always very much of the opinion that as our range has grown, we needed our own space.
‘We started the expansion with real vigour in the second half of 2024, so you have the breadth to justify a larger space of your own. And then it was a case of, okay, we know we want to do it. We know we’ve got the product range, that means we could fill it without it looking too sparse, and we could get the revenue per square foot up. Now, let’s look out for the right opportunity, and be ready to go whenever that opportunity presents itself, because we, well, I’m very aware that our first store couldn’t be a failure.
‘So, we knew where we wanted it to be, we knew what kind of economics would have made sense, and then it was just about being patient. We were waiting for the right opportunity for about nine months until it came up, then when it did, we went from telling them we’re interested to opening the store in about four-and-a-half weeks.
‘You have to be very careful on that first one, it would have taken us a long time to go again had the first one failed. I take huge risks all the time, that’s my job, but on some you just want to make sure you’ve given yourself every chance of success. You don’t get a second chance on the first one, do you? It all had to go right and it has. It’s been fantastic.
‘The market is tough. We’ve done probably three times more than we expected in our forecast. We’re already confident that the store’s profitable, incremental, and is helping as a halo on the ecommerce side. We figured out all the bits and bobs on how to replenish it and how to run it and how to staff it. We’re really, really pleased. It’s been a fantastic result.’
November – the first month of being an online and physical retailer – saw sales 51% higher, and Hewkin expects the full year to be up 30% at more than £31m. ‘We’re profitable. So, we’re happy with that, obviously. To be able to grow at that speed and still have a bit left at the end is good, because growth is very expensive. It’s so competitive this market. If you’re growing, you’re having to muscle someone else out.
‘Our bestselling SKU is now a dining chair. The money’s nice, right? But, actually, it’s more about the customer giving the brand permission to go and sell something else, and for them to say “Yes, I’m confident enough in Swyft as a brand to buy my dining table there.” And that’s what I’m most happy about.
‘We’ve done a small buy of outdoor and a small range to start with. We’ll check we’ve got the permission from the customer, check we can deliver it. But it will be the next big category for us. Generally speaking, outdoor furniture looks pretty ugly. And the delivery proposition can be pretty iffy. I think we can make something that’s beautiful and put it through our next-day proposition, so that when the British sunshine decides to come out for a weekend, on a Friday morning, we can get it to you on the Saturday. Our operation plays into it, and if we can stamp our design authority on something, then we’re up for it.’
Swyft’s most common customer is a woman in a relationship in London, who has bought or is buying their first property, where both are professionals and have a household income of more than £130,000. Very close is the same shopper a decade older, on their second home, or upgrading their first home.
‘We’re quite first-time buyer dependent, and they tend to move and behave slightly differently to the rest to movers, because the pressure to get your first home is consistent, regardless of the economic environment. I don’t care what interest rates are, you don’t want to be sleeping in the room next door to your in-laws for a day longer than you have to, whereas when you’re a mover and a shaker, you optimise because can you put up with having a smaller garage for another year? The whole sector is interest-rate dependent. But I think if I had to pick one, I would probably settle as being overexposed to first-time buyers. I think it’s a little bit easier.
‘You get through the pool of people that are comfortable with buying a high-ticket piece of upholstery online, and you need to continue to grow, and it’s not enough to just be talking to those people that are comfortable with it. You have to meet your customers where they’re at, and if that’s in physical retail, then so be it.’
Given that Swyft’s average sofa sale online is £1,600, viewing is the preferred option for most customers. ‘That’s why most businesses end up maturing to offline. We need access to a wider pool of people. And that’s why we’ve done it. “Where can I see it?” was the top question asked by our customers on live chat for the last two years, every single week bar about three, so we just listened. We thought, hang on, they might be on to something here. It’s gone down very well, so, the radical thought of the day is listen to your customers.’
Store 02 is very likely to be this year, but location is undecided. ‘Now we’ve got Islington we can say, the samples that go out to N1, what do they convert at? What about SW19, how many samples go? If we just lifted the conversion rate to match Islington, how much would that be worth to us? We haven’t done that analysis, and we’re fairly well served with the John Lewis concessions in London, so we could maybe go somewhere like Edinburgh, Glasgow or Manchester where we don’t have the same coverage.’
Swyft is spending about a fifth of revenue on marketing, and Hewkin thinks this will remain. ‘This industry so competitive. Everyone is marketing margin away. So I would anticipate it probably won’t go much higher than that. But the costs now, as we roll stores out, will be another line, and it’ll be in property and staff rather than marketing. I imagine that’ll always add up to around 20% because that’s what most people spend overall and that’s what you have to spend to compete because you use the same tools to target the same people. ‘One thing we’ve had quite a bit of success with recently, which is new to us, is out of home. We’ve been advertising on the tube and buses and we’ve seen a real lift in consideration. More so than spending the next pound on Facebook or Google. That’s worked really well, and a bit of direct mail as well and flyers for people’s houses just after they move: what’s working well is the stuff that’s always worked. I do wonder if people are just a little bit done with digital advertising, and that maybe there’ll be a slight shift back towards old school.’
Swyft expanded online to Continental Europe in February, where its access to Polish upholstery production should have been a key advantage in Germany, followed by Switzerland and Austria. But German tastes and its logistics sector had not been fully allowed for. ‘We thought that would be more of an advantage than it has. The reason is that the product that’s gone down really well for us in Germany is our dining collection. It’s over half of the sales there, and we import that from the Far East. So, we have that wonderful advantage, and then the customers have gone: “Oh yeah, great, but by the way, we like your dining chairs.” So, we’ve had to scramble to get enough of those in. ‘We’ve got to where we’d expected from a top-line point of view, I just never would have expected it to be in dining tables and chairs.
‘The most important learning was that once you’re out of the UK, the freight and logistics network is nowhere near as good. The UK has extremely well-serviced freight and last- mile operations. Germany doesn’t so much. So, we’ve only just launched the next-day service in Germany, and that was in partnership with AIT who do our UK next-day service, so we launched that in Germany together. We’ve taken that whole proposition with them because no one there could do it with us. ‘We haven’t brought that back to the UK as learning as such, but when we launched in Ireland in May, we were able to translate that learning into the Irish market: that helped us get ahead on the challenges we were going to have. Underestimating the strength of the UK logistics network was not something on my bingo card last January, but it’s definitely proven to be true.’
As with any business, mistakes have been made. ‘We launched a made to order offering that was not good. We shouldn’t have done it, we should have kept to the essence of the brand, which was from inventory and fast. We thought it would expand our proposition and allow us to offer more choice, and instead it just confused customers because we had stuff on one lead time and stuff on another. We should never have done that. That’s a big one.
‘We’ve got some designs wrong: 70% of our product has been real hits and 30% hasn’t. So, there’s loads there we could learn from. They were big mistakes. Drifting from your core business is the beginning of the end, I think.’
Despite those, Hewkin’s expectations in 2019 have long been surpassed. ‘Not in my wildest dreams did I ever believe that Swyft was getting to where it’s been. Its been the privilege of my life. Every day I am grateful to get to come to work and build this company, because this has been wild. There is something about Swyft… whatever it is, Swyft’s got it, and it’s like lightning in a bottle. I don’t know how to describe it or bottle it up and to move it on to another idea: we’re just having our moment in time, and it’s a wonderful thing to be a part of.
‘It was me and some good friends with an idea, and that idea got out of hand, really quickly, and now Swyft is what it is, and it’s a wonderful thing to have been a part of.’ Not that he plans to leave. ‘I’ll ride this wave as long as it carries me, and as long as the people around me will have me.’
