Howdens Brand Guidelines: MFI’s 1995 Trade Kitchen Unit, Now a Listed Group

A trade brand started in 1995.

Howdens supplies kitchens and joinery to the building trade from local depots. Its parent, Howden Joinery Group Plc, is a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange, and English Wikipedia says it is a constituent of the FTSE 100 index. The company says Howdens was founded in 1995 and started with 14 depots. English Wikipedia gives the same start: the brand was adopted and developed that year by Matthew Ingle as a business unit within MFI Furniture Group plc, the furniture retailer, and began trading with 14 depots.

The listed company is older than the brand it now carries. Companies House records that it was incorporated on 7 May 1987 as Maxirace Limited, took the name MFI Furniture Group plc in December 1987, became Galiform plc on 23 October 2006, and took its present name on 15 September 2010. The parent of today’s Howdens is therefore the old MFI group company, renamed twice.

The result is a division that outlasted the retailer that started it: the group kept the trade business and, in 2006, sold the MFI retail chain, as the next section sets out.

English Wikipedia says Ingle led the business for twenty-two years; the company announced his retirement in July 2017, and Andrew Livingston joined as chief executive in January 2018.

From MFI to Galiform to Howdens.

The split from MFI came in 2006. English Wikipedia says MFI sold its loss-making retail business in October 2006 to the investment firm Merchant Equity Partners while keeping Howdens, and changed the group’s name to Galiform at the same time; Companies House dates the new name to 23 October 2006. The MFI retail chain entered administration in November 2008, English Wikipedia says, and Galiform became liable for costs linked to 46 former MFI stores. In September 2010 Galiform took the name Howden Joinery Group, naming the parent after the business it had kept.

The trading model is narrow on purpose. The company says it sells only to trade professionals, who then supply and fit kitchens for their own customers, and that its depots keep stock locally so that the trade can collect what it needs. It calls this its trade-only model.

The range is broader than kitchens. English Wikipedia lists kitchens with their worktops, flooring, appliances, sinks, taps and lighting, plus bedrooms, joinery, hardware, tools and bathroom cabinetry. Its own appliance brand, Lamona, launched in 2007, English Wikipedia says. In February 2022 kbbreview reported that Howdens had bought Sheridan Fabrications, a solid-surface worktop maker based in Normanton, West Yorkshire, with around 200 staff, as part of a move into higher-priced kitchens.

Howdens makes much of what it sells. The company says it makes the cabinets for its kitchen ranges and buys in some other products. It describes its Runcorn factory, in Cheshire, as a high-volume panel maker, and says it has installed new furniture lines at its Howden site in East Yorkshire for frontals and panels, skirting and architraves, along with two lines for its Paint to Order service in a purpose-built facility near Howden. English Wikipedia places that paint facility at Thorne, in South Yorkshire.

Design and documentation.

DIY chains, home-improvement retailers and builders’ merchants present themselves through the places where customers meet them. A home-improvement store is usually a large warehouse-style building with long aisles, high racking and a garden or timber area, and the chains describe those stores in their own words on their websites. A builders’ merchant is more often a yard and a branch, where tradespeople buy timber, bricks and fixings across a counter. For a design reader, the shed, the yard and the counter are where the colours, signs and lettering of these companies are seen at full size.

Many trade suppliers also sell from a catalogue and a website, with orders collected from a counter or delivered to site. Printed catalogues, product codes and click-and-collect services appear in the companies’ own descriptions, and in the trade press that covers them. Liveried vans and lorries carry the same names and colours from the branch to the building site, so a merchant’s identity often travels further on the road than it does on the high street.

Store and own-label naming is usually plain. Chains carry a founder’s surname, two merged surnames, or a literal compound of a product and a place, and many sell house ranges under their own names alongside the branded tools and materials they stock. Groups often run several trading names side by side, one for each trade or customer type, rather than folding them into one.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders, owners, listings, demergers and the investment groups that sit behind many chains. Ownership in this sector changes more often than the shop signs do, so the guides in this series date each change of owner to an independent source, describe each name and colour as documented, and treat the palettes shown here as unofficial interpretations.

A shorter name and a second channel.

The brand has been simplified once. English Wikipedia says that in September 2019 Howdens refreshed the creative execution of its brand, with a new logo, and removed the word “Joinery” from the brand mark. The listed parent kept the word in its legal name, Howden Joinery Group Plc, so the full name and the short name now sit side by side.

The depot network is the brand’s public face. kbbreview reported in June 2026 that Howdens operated from 893 depot locations across the UK. In November 2026 the company’s investor website gave a total of 975 depots: 894 in the UK, 61 in France, 18 in the Republic of Ireland and 2 in Belgium. English Wikipedia says it trades as Howdens Cuisines in France and Belgium.

In 2026 Howdens added a route to customers outside the trade. On 3 June 2026 kbbreview reported that it had agreed to buy the parent company of Ultima Furniture Systems Limited, which trades as DIY Kitchens, an online retailer that makes its kitchens to order in short production runs and sells them with its own planning and ordering tools. The magazine said the deal would give Howdens direct access to non-trade customers, and that DIY Kitchens would stay an online-only business run separately from the trade business. On 23 June 2026 Howdens announced that all conditions had been met and that the acquisition was completed.

The two businesses work in opposite ways. kbbreview noted that Howdens makes products to stock in long runs for depots, while DIY Kitchens makes to order for homeowners who plan their own kitchens. Under one owner, the group now covers both the fitter collecting cabinets from a depot and the homeowner ordering online.

For a design guide, Howdens shows how a trade brand can build recognition through a network of plain local depots rather than shop windows. Compare Wren Kitchens, the Humber kitchen maker that sells direct through its own showrooms, and Travis Perkins, the builders’ merchant that also serves the trade. For this guide we use a depot ink blue, timber and chalk with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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