Loaf Brand Guidelines: The Sleep Room, Shacks & Blue Coast Capital

Twelve beds and one mattress.

Loaf was founded in 2008 by Charlie Marshall under another name, The Sleep Room, English Wikipedia says. It started as an online bed shop. Furniture News reported in January 2014 that Marshall had begun with a range of 12 beds and a single mattress, and that he had visited 187 mattress and bed factories over two years before launching. The magazine said the idea came from losing a whole Saturday trying to buy a bed, and that he chose to launch during the economic downturn rather than wait for markets to recover.

The name changed as the range grew. In 2012 the business rebranded as Loaf when it moved beyond beds and sleep into other parts of the home. English Wikipedia says The Telegraph covered the launch of its sofas and armchairs, along with lighting, rugs and textiles, and that kitchen furniture followed the next year. Furniture News reported in 2014 that sofas and kitchen tables, added in 2012, already made up a significant part of the business. Retail Gazette summed up the history in May 2021: Loaf was “born out of” the online bed retailer The Sleep Room and expanded into sofas and bedroom furniture when it took its new name in 2012.

Outside money arrived in January 2014, when Peter Simon, founder of the fashion chains Monsoon and Accessorize, took a significant minority stake, Furniture News reported. At that point Loaf was still mostly an online store, with a team of about 40 based at a showroom-style head office in west London, and it was already planning physical stores under a name of its own.

Shacks, not showrooms.

Loaf calls its shops Shacks. English Wikipedia says the founder used the name in 2014 for the showrooms that were to come, that a site in Battersea, London, was chosen in June 2015, and that a third showroom opened in Spitalfields, in east London, in May 2017.

The chain then moved beyond London. In July 2022 Furniture News reported that Loaf’s ninth Shack would be in Edinburgh, at Straiton Retail Park: the brand’s first showroom in Scotland, with 9,100 sq ft of open-plan space, a mattress-testing area on a mezzanine and 800 sq ft given to the mugs, candles and other small homewares the company sells as “Loafing Supplies.” The Edinburgh store opened in February 2023, the magazine later reported. In September 2023 it reported the tenth Shack, a two-floor, 15,500 sq ft site in one of the original mill buildings at Redbrick, near Leeds, with dedicated areas for modular sofas, sofa beds and beds, table football, retro sweet machines, snugs for watching films and a built-in fireplace.

London openings continued. A Chiswick Shack opened in summer 2024, and in July 2025 Furniture News reported that the 11th Shack was opening on Essex Road in Islington on 17 July, after the closure of the Spitalfields showroom, as the brand moved to a larger site. The 4,100 sq ft store was designed by Loaf’s in-house team with the design studio Studio Jill, which had also worked on Chiswick. Its features included the brand’s first Movie Lounge, with popcorn and film screenings, a colouring-in station, choc ices and a welcome for dogs; a Furniture News profile in November 2025 described the open store in the same terms.

Showrooms, swatches and room sets.

British sofa, furniture and bed retailers sell large, slow purchases, and most of them present themselves through the showroom before anything else. Several chains grew on out-of-town retail parks, where a single unit can hold many sofas set out as room sets, and their websites send shoppers back to those floors with store finders, appointment booking and the offer of a specialist who will walk them through sizes, fabrics and leathers.

The fabric swatch sits at the centre of the sale. Many ranges are made to order, so one sofa design is shown in a single cover on the shop floor and offered online and in store in a long list of fabrics and finishes; one UK chain’s website, for example, lists more than 200 fabrics and leathers. Alongside in-house ranges, several retailers sell collections made with magazine titles, fashion labels or long-established furniture makers, and credit those partners by name.

Advertising is seasonal and public. Television campaigns have been part of the category’s face for decades, and retailer websites carry named sale events in the same banner space as their ranges. The store fascia, the advert and the website usually share one short brand name, often a set of initials or a plain phrase about sofas or beds.

Behind the shop window sits a separate corporate voice. Listed groups publish investor sites with dated history timelines, founder stories, the brands they own and the number of showrooms each one runs; private-equity and overseas owners enter the same record through takeovers, administrations and changes of name. This guide follows that record: who founded each company, who owns it now, and how its name and look have changed along the way.

A new owner and a house vocabulary.

Ownership changed in two steps. In May 2021 Loaf appointed Grant Thornton to run a sale of the business, Retail Gazette reported, citing The Times; the founder was then still chief executive. Blue Coast Capital acquired a majority interest in 2021, and in August 2026 Furniture News reported that it had bought the remaining shares from the founder and now owned 100% of the business. Blue Coast’s chair said the founder had stayed on during a transition period as “brand guardian” while a new chief executive settled into the role, and had not been actively involved in the business since 2023. By September 2023 Furniture News was quoting Sam Perkins as Loaf’s chief executive.

Much of Loaf’s identity sits in its words. Its showrooms are Shacks, its small homewares are Loafing Supplies, its newer stores have Movie Lounges, and the company invites shoppers to “rest-test” its sofas and beds before they buy, as Furniture News reported in 2026. The founder described the Edinburgh store in 2022 as packed with “squishy sofas,” beds, cabinetry and lighting. The stores themselves carry the same informal tone, with games, sweets and snugs set among the furniture in the Redbrick and Islington Shacks.

The product range has followed the name change. From a dozen beds in 2008, the business now sells sofas and armchairs, beds, cabinetry, tables, rugs and lighting, according to the trade reports on its Edinburgh, Redbrick and Islington openings, and it keeps a website alongside its Shacks.

For a design guide, Loaf shows how a retailer can build an identity from tone of voice and store naming as much as from a logo. Compare Arlo & Jacob, another British sofa brand with its own showrooms, and John Lewis. For this guide we use a brick red, butter yellow and oat cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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