Hobbycraft Brand Guidelines: A 1995 Bournemouth Craft Superstore, Bridgepoint & Modella

A garden-trade family and a craft superstore.

Hobbycraft is a British chain of arts and crafts superstores with its head office in Bournemouth, on the Dorset coast. It began in 1995, when the Haskins family opened the first store just outside the town, The Independent reported in April 2010. English Wikipedia describes the family business behind it, the Haskins Group, as a nursery and garden supplier in the south of England.

The idea was a large store given over to making things. The Independent described Hobbycraft in 2010 as an “out-of-town arts and crafts retailer” selling more than 35,000 products, from wedding stationery to haberdashery, and said that it had done well during the economic downturn of the late 2000s as shoppers turned back to repairing and making their own things. At that point the chain had 47 stores, and the Haskins family still owned most of the shares.

Later reports show how the mix has moved. Retail Gazette wrote in July 2026 that model paints, varnishes and tools, and crochet kits, had been among the busiest parts of the online shop, and that the company was enlarging its hobby category and its Model World range for model-makers.

Hobbycraft also runs a customer club. English Wikipedia says the company launched its own mobile app in August 2023, which customers can use to search for products, find help and ideas, and manage their Hobbycraft Club loyalty membership.

Fourteen years with Bridgepoint.

In spring 2010 the Haskins family sold Hobbycraft to the private equity firm Bridgepoint, in a deal structured as a management buyout, with the chief executive staying on, The Independent reported on 30 April 2010. Bridgepoint, which also owned the clothing chain Fat Face and the sandwich chain Pret A Manger at the time, according to the paper, said it saw room for many more stores, for better distribution and sourcing, and for a larger online business. The sale had been contested: the paper said the private equity firms Blackstone, TA Associates and Exponent had also shown keen interest in the chain.

The years that followed were about building that infrastructure. English Wikipedia says the company moved its distribution operation from Blandford Forum in Dorset to Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire, alongside a new IT and shipping system. The Guardian reported in September 2014 that the cost of the new Burton warehouse and of a new online trading platform had weighed on that year’s results, while four new stores had taken the chain to just short of 80. English Wikipedia adds that in December 2014 Bridgepoint brought in the retailer Archie Norman to help turn the business round.

The same Guardian report described a new kind of competition. Supermarkets and discounters, including Aldi, Lidl and Poundland, had begun selling craft basics such as felt-tip pens, double-sided tape, face-painting kits and loom bands, and Hobbycraft had lowered its own prices in response.

By the time Bridgepoint sold, the estate had more than doubled in size. Retail Gazette reported on 27 August 2024 that Hobbycraft employed around 1,500 people across 119 stores in the UK. Completely Retail reported the same day that Bridgepoint had put the business up for sale in February 2024, and that the specialist retail investor Modella Capital had completed the purchase for an undisclosed sum. Modella’s executives had previously backed chains including Paperchase and Tie Rack, the title said, and Retail Gazette described Modella as affiliated to the turnaround firm Rcapital.

Design and documentation.

Discount, home and hobby retailers in Europe, Britain, Australia and Malaysia tend to present themselves first through the store itself. The sign over the door, the logo on the bags and the layout of the aisles carry most of the identity, and many of these chains repeat one standard format from town to town, so a shopper meets the same look in a high street, a retail park or a shopping centre.

Own-label ranges are a second layer. Many of these retailers sell established consumer brands alongside goods under their own names, and they publish those range names on their websites, packaging and shelf cards. For a design guide, the useful facts are the ones the companies state themselves: what each range is called, what it covers and how it sits beside branded stock, rather than any claim about quality or price.

Store networks are the third. Chains in this group publish their store counts, the countries they trade in and the mix of company-run and franchise branches, and those figures move quickly as new sites open and others close. Any count is only as good as its date, so the guides in this series give each figure with the year of the source that reports it.

Ownership is the fourth. Some of these businesses began as a single shop run by a founder or a family, and later passed to private-equity firms, listed parent groups or stock-market investors. Their corporate pages usually tell that story, from the first store to the current owner, and the guides here describe family and group ownership plainly, with dates, as the sources set it out.

A restructuring, completed early.

Under its new owner the chain was restructured. In April 2025 Hobbycraft confirmed a round of store closures, Retail Gazette reported; the changes reached its shops, the head office in Bournemouth and the distribution centre at Burton-on-Trent, which serves the store network. In August 2025 the same title reported further closures, including the shops at Southport, Stratford-upon-Avon and Wigan.

The restructuring took the form of a company voluntary arrangement, or CVA, launched in May 2025. On 21 July 2026 Retail Gazette reported that Hobbycraft had completed the CVA ahead of schedule, after thirteen months. During that period it had closed underperforming stores and opened three smaller branches inside garden centres, at Towcester, Frankton and Grantham. The same report said the company was putting effort into workshops, online tutorials and in-store craft advice, and that a crochet collection made with the Olympic diver Tom Daley, called Made With Love, had launched in October 2025.

Hobbycraft remains owned by Modella Capital, with its head office in Bournemouth and its distribution centre at Burton-on-Trent, as of the July 2026 report.

For a design guide, Hobbycraft shows a specialist superstore organised around a single activity, making things, with ranges that run from haberdashery to model kits under one roof. Compare The Range, another out-of-town British home and leisure chain, and Dunelm. For this guide we use a workbench teal, a yarn ochre and a paper cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hobbycraft’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.