DFS (British retailer)
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| Traded as | : |
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| Industry | Retail |
| Founded | 1969 (as Northern Upholstery) |
| Founder | Graham Kirkham |
| Headquarters | Doncaster, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom |
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Key people
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Richard Baker, (Chairman) Ian Filby, (Chief executive officer) |
| Products | Furniture |
| Revenue | £913.1 million (2015) |
| £89.2 million (2015) | |
| £3.2 million (2015) | |
| Parent | Advent International |
| Website | www |
DFS, stylised as dfs and formerly Direct Furnishing Supplies, is a furniture retailer in the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands and Ireland specialising in sofas and soft furnishings. It is listed on the .
In 1969, aged 24, Kirkham was married with two children, which he describes as great motivation. Having visited a few manufacturers in his daily work, he decided that making furniture was relatively easy and that by cutting out the warehouse dealers in the middle of the supply chain, he could sell direct to the public at lower prices. Kirkham rented a room above a snooker hall in Carcroft, and started making furniture upstairs and retailing it downstairs.
By 1983, Darley Dale–based Direct Furnishing Supplies, founded by Herbert Hardy in around 1970, had become one of Northern Upholstery's biggest suppliers. Kirkham bought it. Northern Upholstery was renamed DFS (although branches of Northern Upholstery in Yorkshire had retained their original name until the mid-1990s) and at the time had a total of 63 stores employing 2,000 staff.
In 1993, DFS was floated on the stock market and valued at £271 million, with Kirkham and his family trusts owning just over half of the shares. This brought the Kirkham family to the attention of thieves, who in 1994 broke into the family home at Sprotborough while they were on holiday. The burglars bound and gagged the housekeeper and made off with money and jewels worth £2.4 million - later recovered - but still South Yorkshire's largest armed robbery.
In 1998, DFS announced its first drop in profits in 28 years to the . The company reworked its advertising to feature younger models and in 2000 DFS announced a 79 per cent profit increase. But the revival was short lived, and in light of the continuing prevalence for Private Equity, Kirkham took the chain private again, leveraging his family's own 9.46% stake with £150 million of family funds in an eventual £496 million deal.
Kirkham told the Yorkshire Post: "It's something that's caused me fitful sleep in the time I've been thinking about it. I've no hobby, this is my hobby – it's what I do. I'm an entrepreneur. It's almost as if I can feel the adrenaline running through my veins."
On 3 April 2010, it was announced that DFS had been sold to private equity firm Advent International for a reported £500 million. DFS then acquired two smaller British retailers which had been struggling in the market: Sofa Workshop in 2013 and Dwell in August 2014. On 6 March 2015, the company floated on the .
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