The story behind
The Oak Bed Store
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2008
A furniture show and an idea that stuck
Sam had spent over twenty years in the designer menswear industry, owning stores across the south, when a friend invited him to a furniture trade show in Birmingham, more out of curiosity than anything else.
He came back with a simple plan: Oli, who knew his way around computers, would build the website, and his two children, Aaron and Nina, would answer the phones and emails.
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2009
The launch
The website went live in September.
For the first two weeks it sold nothing at all. Sam still tells people about sitting there, head in his hands, convinced he'd just spent a fortune on beds nobody wanted.
Then one order came in. Then another.
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2015
When it stopped being a side project
For years, the beds ran quietly alongside the family clothing business.
That changed when Nina finished university, and the three of them, Sam, Aaron and Nina, decided it was time to give the furniture business their full attention.
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2016
No supplier and an expensive lesson
The factory they relied on shut down overnight, just as orders were finally growing.
Aaron ended up living in Asia for six months, searching for a replacement. One attempt cost them their deposit when the supplier's quality fell apart as soon as production began.
Rather than sell something they weren't proud of, they walked away. Back to square one.
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2023
The question about veneer
For years, a layer of oak veneer gave every bed the same uniform finish. But over time, the family began to question why real wood needed to look uniform in the first place.
So the veneer went. In came solid oak, with its grain, tone and natural variation left exactly as it should be.
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Today
Still very much a family thing
Nearly two decades on, the same three family members, along with Oli, are still at the heart of everything we do.
Quality has always been at the heart of what we do, so even after each headboard and footboard has been checked and passed at the factory, we still carefully open and inspect every single one before it leaves our warehouse.
It’s something we’ve done since we first started back in 2009, and nearly two decades later, that personal attention to detail hasn’t changed.
