Multiyork was a privately owned British
furniture
Furniture refers to movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating (e.g., stools, chairs, and sofas), eating (tables), storing items, eating and/or working with an item, and sleeping (e.g., beds and hammocks). Fu ...
retailer
Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and t ...
based in
Thetford
Thetford is a market town and civil parish in the Breckland District of Norfolk, England. It is on the A11 road between Norwich and London, just east of Thetford Forest. The civil parish, covering an area of , in 2015 had a population of 24,340 ...
,
Norfolk
Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...
. The company employed nearly 550 people in its 50 stores across the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
and its factory and head office in Thetford, where it was a major business. Multiyork was a member of the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers and carried the Manufacturing Guild Mark.
The company entered
administration
Administration may refer to:
Management of organizations
* Management, the act of directing people towards accomplishing a goal
** Administrative assistant, Administrative Assistant, traditionally known as a Secretary, or also known as an admini ...
on 22 November 2017,
followed by its sister company
Feather & Black on 27 November.
History
Multiyork was founded in 1978 and initially operated in the Old Mill site in
Mellis
Mellis is a small village in Suffolk, England. It has the largest area of unfenced common land in England. Oliver Cromwell exercised his troops in Mellis. It once had a railway station on the main line between London and Norwich, and a small b ...
, a small village in
Suffolk
Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...
. Multiyork was purchased out of receivership by the Wade Furniture Group in February 1995.
[ At that time there were 28 stores. The factory and Head Office have been based at Thetford in Norfolk since 1992 and in 2000 Multiyork expanded its site increasing factory capacity to the production of over 1,000 pieces of ]furniture
Furniture refers to movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating (e.g., stools, chairs, and sofas), eating (tables), storing items, eating and/or working with an item, and sleeping (e.g., beds and hammocks). Fu ...
a week.
Multiyork's 60th store opened in Lakeside Shopping Centre
Lakeside Shopping Centre, is a large out-of-town shopping centre located in West Thurrock, Essex just beyond the eastern boundary of Greater London. It was constructed on the site of a former chalk quarry. The first tenants moved into the compl ...
in Thurrock in October 2008 and was the first to follow a new lifestyle led in-store format.
Administration
Multiyork entered administration on 22 November 2017, with around 550 jobs said to be at risk. An administrator cited a fall in consumer confidence.[
In December 2017, ]DFS Furniture
DFS (DFS Furniture plc, stylised as dfs, is a furniture retailer in the United Kingdom, Spain and Ireland specialising in sofas and soft furnishings. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
History Northern Upholstery
In 1969, aged 22, Gr ...
(DFS) reached an agreement to purchase the eight store leases, product designs, marketing databases and the Multiyork brand for £1.2 million. The deal also specified that as of 18 February, administrators will stop using the Multiyork brand. Six of the stores will reopen under the Sofa Workshop
DFS (DFS Furniture plc, stylised as dfs, is a furniture retailer in the United Kingdom, Spain and Ireland specialising in sofas and soft furnishings. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
History Northern Upholstery
In 1969, aged 22, Gr ...
brand; the remaining two will open as branches of DFS.
Craftsmanship
All Multiyork sofas were made at its Thetford factory. The company employed a team of 60 seamstress
A dressmaker, also known as a seamstress, is a person who makes custom clothing for women, such as dresses, blouses, and evening gowns. Dressmakers were historically known as mantua-makers, and are also known as a modiste or fabrician.
Nota ...
es who stitched the upholstery
Upholstery is the work of providing furniture, especially seats, with padding, springs, webbing, and fabric or leather covers. The word also refers to the materials used to upholster something.
''Upholstery'' comes from the Middle English word ...
fabrics. Multiyork operated a sewing
Sewing is the craft of fastening or attaching objects using stitches made with a sewing needle and thread. Sewing is one of the oldest of the textile arts, arising in the Paleolithic era. Before the invention of spinning yarn or weaving fabr ...
apprenticeship school to ensure that these skills were passed down from one generation to the next and to preserve the craft within the local region. Not only did Multiyork use their own fabrics
Textile is an umbrella term that includes various fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, filaments, threads, different fabric types, etc. At first, the word "textiles" only referred to woven fabrics. However, weaving is not the ...
but also offered designer fabrics such as Mulberry
''Morus'', a genus of flowering plants in the family Moraceae, consists of diverse species of deciduous trees commonly known as mulberries, growing wild and under cultivation in many temperate world regions. Generally, the genus has 64 identif ...
, Designers Guild
Designers Guild is an international home and lifestyle company with a flagship store and showrooms on Kings Road and Marylebone High Street in London, as well as offices in London, Paris, and Munich.
Designers Guild designs and wholesales furnis ...
, Arthur Sanderson
Arthur Sanderson & Sons Ltd, now known simply as Sanderson, is a British manufacturer of fabrics and wallpaper, founded in 1860.
Company
The company was founded in 1860 in Islington, London, by Arthur Sanderson (1829–1882), who began by ...
, Romo and Jane Churchill.
The factory store
Multiyork's factory outlet
An outlet store, factory outlet or factory shop is a brick and mortar or online store in which manufacturers sell their stock directly to the public. Traditionally, a factory outlet was a store attached to a factory or warehouse, sometimes allowin ...
was run out of its original site in Mellis. The store had over dedicated to clearance stock, including ex display and end of line stock, as well as cancelled customer orders and customer returns.
Fundraising
In 2009 Multiyork raised £25,000 for BBC Children in Need. The company's in-house design team created six limited edition Pudsey sofas, five of which toured its stores and travelled a total of between them to raise funds.
The sofas, which incorporated Pudsey Bear and the ‘We’re Supporting BBC Children in Need’ banner, were also featured on BBC One
BBC One is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's flagship network and is known for broadcasting mainstream programming, which includes BBC News television bulletins, p ...
on the appeal night programme and were auctioned off through the BBC's Children in Need eBay
eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...
auction to raise further cash.
References
External links
*{{official website, https://www.multiyork.co.uk/
Modern Furniture
Oak Furniture House
Thetford
Companies based in Norfolk
Furniture retailers of the United Kingdom
Retail companies established in 1978
Retail companies disestablished in 2017
Companies that have entered administration in the United Kingdom