Tile Mountain Brand Guidelines: A 2013 Stoke-on-Trent Tile Etailer With Showrooms

Former tile-chain directors start again online.

Tile Mountain was launched as an online tile retailer in June 2013. Retail Week reported on 11 June 2013 that the website had gone live the week before, set up by Mo Iqbal, who had worked for Topps Tiles and built Tile Giant before selling it to Travis Perkins, together with colleagues including Jeremy Harris, a former commercial director of Topps. Nick Ounstead, a former Topps chief executive, joined as a non-executive director. In 2020 the trade magazine kbbreview described Iqbal, Harris and Ounstead as the founders.

The idea, as Retail Week set it out, was a specialist tile seller that traded mainly on the web, offering free samples sent out within a day so that buyers could see and handle a tile before ordering in bulk. The business distributed from a warehouse in Stoke-on-Trent, the city of the Potteries, and was about to open a shop next to it. Iqbal told the paper he did not expect a large chain, but could see a limited number of outlets supporting the online business.

In an interview with kbbreview in October 2016, Harris, then managing director and a joint founder, said the company had invested in stock depth so that orders could be delivered the next day, and that it bought tiles from the Far East, the Middle East, Europe and the UK, with Spain an important source. He said the company was building a new warehouse in Stoke-on-Trent because it was short of space to pick and pack orders. He argued that tiles are heavy and awkward to carry, so delivery to the door suited buyers, and that being based in the UK helped the company get orders to customers quickly.

Warehouses, showrooms and a group of brands.

The new site opened in April 2017 in Tunstall, one of the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent, English Wikipedia says: about 120,000 square feet, with a warehouse, a showroom and offices.

Growth then came by acquisition. By June 2020, kbbreview reported, the group had bought Capitol Tiles Distribution of Coventry, the online retailer Tons of Tiles and Walls and Floors; English Wikipedia dates the Walls and Floors purchase to May 2019. The parent became the Tile Mountain Group, which also trades as Bathroom Mountain, according to the Stoke Sentinel.

The online seller also became a showroom chain. In June 2020 kbbreview reported a Birmingham showroom near the city centre, the third in the group, spread over 12,000 square feet on two levels and following the design of the flagship in Stoke-on-Trent and the branch in Stockport. English Wikipedia adds a showroom at Liverpool Shopping Park in September 2021. Harris told the magazine that many customers still wanted to see tiles up close before buying, and that the showrooms were meant to serve them alongside the website. In November 2026 the company’s own store finder listed 23 showrooms, from Basildon and Bristol to Cardiff and Cheltenham.

The range has widened with the stores. Besides wall and floor tiles in ceramic, porcelain and natural stone, the company’s website lists outdoor slabs, vinyl, laminate and engineered wood flooring, and tools and accessories, and offers cut samples of its tiles.

Sport has carried the name too. Stoke City’s East Stand at the bet365 Stadium was named the Tile Mountain Stand under a sponsorship that was extended in September 2020, English Wikipedia says, and in 2021 the company sponsored the away shirts of the rugby league club Hull Kingston Rovers.

Showrooms, samples and ranges.

Flooring, carpet and tile retailers sell something that is hard to judge on a screen. A carpet’s pile, a vinyl plank’s grain and a tile’s glaze are chosen by hand and by eye, so these companies present themselves largely through physical display: showroom floors laid with sample sections, racks of carpet samples, stands of plank flooring and, in tile shops, walls set with finished panels. Several now take the showroom to the customer as well, sending vans or fitters with sample boards to measure a room at home, and their websites let shoppers order small samples before they buy.

Range and store naming tend to be plain. Collections are usually named for a material, a colour or a place, and products are grouped by room and by type, such as carpet, laminate, vinyl, luxury vinyl tile, engineered wood or porcelain, rather than by technical code. Shop fascias usually carry the retailer’s own name in large type, and some chains also run concessions inside department stores under their own brand.

The advertising follows the same practical line. The companies’ own pages and press reports show campaigns built around sales periods, interest-free credit, home visits and fitting, published in catalogues, on television, online and on shop windows, with buying guides that explain yarns, finishes and room-by-room choices.

Behind the shops, the corporate story is often one of founders, family owners, investors and changes of control. Corporate pages and press reports record listings on and departures from stock markets, private-equity and hedge-fund owners, administrations and pre-pack sales, and brands that survive after the original company has closed. This guide sets out who founded each chain, who owns it and what happened to it, as dated sources record it.

A Tunstall campus on tile-making ground.

Tile Mountain’s base sits in a district long tied to tile-making. On 1 September 2025 the BBC reported that Tile Mountain Group had bought the 30-acre former Johnson Tiles site in Tunstall from Norcross, the former owner of Johnson Tiles, whose production there had stopped the year before. The site lies next to the group’s existing warehouse complex, which the BBC gave as about 400,000 square feet. The BBC named Iqbal as chair of Tile Mountain Group.

The Stoke Sentinel reported the same deal as completed and described the neighbouring warehouse as serving both Tile Mountain and Bathroom Mountain. In September 2026 the paper’s local democracy reporter wrote that the company, which already occupied five buildings in the area, had submitted plans to clear the former factory buildings on the site and replace them with a new automated distribution warehouse.

Its own website says Tile Mountain was founded in 2013 by people from the tile industry, and it presents itself through next-day delivery, sample tiles and its showrooms rather than through a long history. In the dated record the story is short: an online launch in 2013, a purpose-built warehouse in 2017, a string of acquisitions by 2020, a chain of showrooms after that, and in 2025 the purchase of a former tile factory next door, with one of the founders still in the chair, according to the BBC.

For a design guide, Tile Mountain shows a retailer that started on the screen and then built physical showrooms to let customers see tiles up close. Compare Topps Tiles, where its founders worked before, and CTD Tiles, another British tile seller. For this guide we use deep teal, fired clay and grout grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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