Wool merchants in a Somerset town.

Relyon traces itself to 1858 and to the Somerset town of Wellington. The company says it was “founded in 1858 by a Somerset family of wool merchants,” and that the business, Price Brothers and Co., developed mattresses filled entirely with wool. Its January 2025 contract brochure tells the same story at more length: the business began “as a wool merchant,” was “originally named by the founding Price family as Price Brothers and Co.,” and “evolved rapidly into manufacturing beds.”

The brand name came later. “In 1935 the name was changed to Relyon,” the brochure says, “as the goal was to design beds that you could truly ‘rely on’ for a good night’s sleep.” The company closes that brochure with the line “You can rely on Relyon.” Its website describes the name as “born out of a reputation for hand crafting wonderfully comfortable natural mattresses.”

Wellington has stayed its home. The brochure says “the heart of the business and the manufacturing headquarters remain in Wellington, Somerset,” and the law firm Michelmores, reporting the company’s rescue in August 2020, described “a 150-year history of making high-quality beds in the West Country.” In 2019 the local paper, the Wellington Weekly News, reported that Relyon had a sister company, Pritex, which had been sold to Saint-Gobain earlier that year.

Handmade in Somerset, with its own springs and timber.

Relyon’s identity rests on making and on natural materials. Its website carries the lines “Since 1858,” “Creating comfort naturally” and “Handmade in Somerset,” and speaks of “handcrafting comfort from the world’s finest natural materials” and “using the finest natural fillings.” The brochure says “all of Relyon’s mattresses are handmade using time-honoured skills” and describes them as pocket-sprung beds. These are the company’s own claims.

Relyon says it has “its own spring manufacturing on site, as well as its own wood mill,” that the timber for its divans is FSC certified, and that its pocket springs are covered in calico. The brochure adds that its craftsmen “train for many years” and that the company keeps reinvesting in training and machinery. Its brochure cover carries a “zero waste to landfill” mark and a ten-year guarantee, and its website cites ISO 14001 certification for its environmental practices and a commitment to ISO 9001 principles.

The range is organised in a few named families. The website lists the Peerless, Heritage, Classic and Contemporary mattresses, alongside divans, storage and ottoman bases, headboards, pillows and upholstered bedroom pieces, and a separate Boutique Contract range for hotels and other trade buyers; the 2025 contract brochure groups its beds as Contract Ortho, Contract Support and Contract Luxury.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mattress names: Silentnight, Relyon, Eve, Layla, Helix, Leesa and Dunlopillo. Mattress brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from long-established factory names sold through bed shops and department stores to younger companies that began by selling online and delivering a mattress rolled up in a box, and a single name can change hands more than once while the product on the shop floor looks much the same.

A mattress brand’s identity is usually carried less by the product itself, which is mostly hidden under a sheet, than by a name, a label stitched to the side, the box it arrives in and the advertising around it. The company behind that name may have been sold, gone through administration, seen its name pass to different owners in different countries or moved its making elsewhere. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its mattresses are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its mattresses are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Steinhoff, Alteri and a 2020 rescue.

Relyon’s recent ownership has changed several times. By the late 2010s it belonged to the South African group Steinhoff International. In August 2019 the Wellington Weekly News reported that Relyon had been put up for sale, linking the sale to the accounting scandal that hit Steinhoff at the end of 2017. The paper put its workforce then at nearly 500, more than 450 of them in Wellington and the rest in nearby Taunton. In November 2019 the same paper reported that Relyon had been acquired by Alteri Investors, which it described as a specialist investor in the European retail sector, in the deal in which Steinhoff sold Blue Group, the parent of the bed retailers Bensons for Beds and Harveys; Retail Gazette reported on 15 November 2019 that the group included Relyon among its manufacturers.

That ownership did not last. In August 2020 Relyon was bought out of administration from the administrators, PwC, by Michco 2001 Ltd, “a new company set up by former Relyon Group Chief Executive Ian Topping, and other private investors,” Michelmores reported on 5 August 2020; Furniture News reported the deal the next day. The buyers took the business, the freehold of its Wellington site and the intellectual property of the Relyon and Dunlopillo brand names, and the deal preserved 280 jobs. Michelmores said the company would be renamed Relyon Beds Ltd, the name on the company’s 2025 brochure, which has owned the business since 2020.

The Relyon name is therefore again held by a company of its own, still in the town where the Price family started, and the same 2020 deal brought the Dunlopillo name in Britain under the same owner. The brochure describes a nationwide delivery operation from Wellington and “some international stockists,” in the company’s own words.

For a design guide, Relyon shows how a maker can build an identity on place, age and material rather than on advertising characters. Compare Silentnight, the Lancashire bed maker built on a cartoon double act, and Dunlopillo, whose British rights came to Relyon’s owner in 2020. For this guide we use a Somerset green, natural wool and a timber brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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