The Range Brand Guidelines: A 1989 Plymouth Superstore, Wilko, Homebase & Bathstore

A Plymouth market trader’s variety store, 1989.

The Range is the trading name of CDS (Superstores International) Limited, a British variety store and garden centre retailer based in Plymouth, English Wikipedia says. The letters CDS stand for Chris Dawson Superstores, after the founder, Retail Gazette explained in a 2024 interview with him.

Chris Dawson started out as an open-air market trader in Plymouth in 1966, according to English Wikipedia, and in the early 1980s opened two cash-and-carry stores, in Exeter and Newton Abbot, which he sold at the end of that decade. In 1989 he opened Chris Dawson Superstores as a single, standalone variety store at the Sugar Mill Retail Park in Plymouth. Retail Gazette gives the same outline in its interview: a market trader who set up the business in his home city in 1989.

The single store grew into a chain during the 1990s, and early in that decade the shops were renamed The Range. By the end of the 1990s the chain had a presence across the South West of England, English Wikipedia says. In the 2000s it expanded across Great Britain, and that growth drew partly on other retailers’ failures: it took on stores and stock from the administrations of Focus DIY, T. J. Hughes, MFI, Woolworths and Empire Direct.

The business has stayed rooted in its home city. In March 2019 it announced that its head office would move from the Estover area of Plymouth to a new building at Derriford, next door to its flagship store, according to English Wikipedia, which adds that the head office was reported to employ more than 300 people.

Home, garden and concessions under one roof.

English Wikipedia classes The Range as a variety store and garden centre retailer, and Retail Gazette has described it as a home, garden and furniture specialist. The same publication reported in 2024 that it had grown to more than 200 stores across the UK.

A chain of that size runs on warehouses. English Wikipedia lists a distribution centre at Thorne, near Doncaster, opened in October 2012; another at Avonmouth, Bristol, opened in June 2017; and a third at Stowmarket, Suffolk, opened in November 2024. The chain crossed the Irish Sea in 2016, opening in the Republic of Ireland in August and in Northern Ireland in October that year.

Other businesses trade inside the stores. English Wikipedia records coffee-shop concessions in The Range, some of them known as Café Eighty-Nine, and a concession partnership with the supermarket chain Iceland announced in August 2018, later joined by Iceland cafés in some locations. Retail Gazette mentioned the Café Eighty Nine concept again in 2024, when the group was trialling it in a Wilko shop in Exeter.

More recently the arrangement has also run the other way, with The Range opening inside other retailers. In November 2025 it opened a concession inside a Tesco store in Yardley, its first store-in-store, and in August 2026 another inside a Morrisons store in Palmers Green, English Wikipedia says.

Discount, home and hobby retail.

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.

Older high-street names inside one fascia.

Since 2023 CDS Superstores has bought established high-street names out of administration and folded them into its own stores. In September 2023 it acquired the Wilko brand and website after the discount chain collapsed; no shops were included in the purchase. English Wikipedia says the Wilko website was relaunched on 12 October 2023 and that Wilko products began to be sold in The Range’s stores that month. Retail Gazette reported in 2024 that the group was selling Wilko-branded products in The Range and had reopened Wilko shops, starting with sites in Exeter, Plymouth and Luton. The same publication said the Wilko website had been trading again less than a month after the purchase and had grown to more than 100,000 products within ten months, including a first Wilko kitchen range. English Wikipedia dates the first two reopenings, in Plymouth and Exeter, to 1 December 2023, records a seventh Wilko shop in Uxbridge in November 2024, and says new Wilko openings were put on hold in February 2025.

The next name was Homebase. On 13 November 2024 Retail Gazette reported that CDS Superstores had acquired the Homebase brand name, its intellectual property and up to 70 UK stores as the DIY chain entered administration, and that the acquired stores would trade as Homebase for a few months before reopening as The Range. English Wikipedia says that 49 former Homebase sites had been converted to The Range fascia by 16 May 2025, each with a “Garden Centre by Homebase” area, and that the Homebase website was relaunched on 21 January 2025. In February 2025 the in-store kitchen brands Jonas & James and The Range Kitchens were merged under the name Kitchens by Homebase.

A third name followed. The intellectual property of Bathstore passed to CDS Superstores on 25 April 2025, English Wikipedia says, and the first Bathstore concession inside a branch of The Range opened in Milton Keynes in September 2025. At the time of the Homebase deal, Retail Gazette named Alex Simpkin as group chief executive of CDS Superstores.

For a design guide, The Range shows how one store fascia can carry several older retail names inside it, from Wilko ranges to Homebase garden centres and Bathstore showrooms. Compare Wilko, whose brand the group now owns, and Dunelm, another British home retailer that grew from a market stall. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm ochre and a coral red with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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