The high street has been hit hard by the recession. With the property market in the doldrums, furniture shops have been among the biggest casualties. Yet Warren Evans's bed business is thriving. Sales at the Camden-based bed maker are up 60% on last year, with the company expecting turnover to hit £13m this year.
For Texas-born Evans, it couldn't be more different from the 1990s downturn, when he lost his three-bedroom semi-detached home in West Hampstead after going bankrupt. "I've learned a lot since then," says the 46-year-old. "We have no debt, no outside investors, and have got more aggressive with our marketing. In a recession, it really makes you stand out."
The son of a Harvard economist, Evans came to Britain aged 13, when his father got a job with the economic thinker Ernst Schumacher. "That's the guy who came up with the phrase 'small is beautiful'."
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Summers were spent in Maine on the east coast of the US. This was where Evans got his first taste for working with wood, helping a friend's father make speedboats and bi-planes out of pine. "I just loved it. Here you had a natural product that was not a high pollutant," and because it was pine, it could be used sustainably, unlike hardwoods from the rainforests.
So in 1979, aged 17, Evans built his first wooden bed in a Clerkenwell basement. With £600 borrowed from his sister, he bought two big tabletops, a drill, saw and chisel, and put a one-line advertisement on the back of Time Out. Soon he was making one or two beds a week.
But when the housing crash hit in the early 1990s, sales slumped. By 1992, he owed £300,000 personally, and the firm owed another £300,000. "It was a quick bankruptcy. Quick and dangerous." One creditor even physically threatened him. "So I didn't go back to my house. One Thursday, I just moved out with my six-year old son. It was really scary."
With "nothing else to do", he took a job with a bedmaker underneath a railway arch in Camden. But "he did such a poor job of paying the bills that I ended up paying the rent" and Evans took over the business in 1993. Homeless, he had no choice but to move into the rat-infested workshop as well. "And when I say rats, I mean they were playing cards in the yard, smoking cigars shouting 'eff off out of here, we have a game going on'. Back then, Camden was a rough-ass end of town."
Evans began pushing the environmental benefits of using pine in advertising, "as when someone says they use sustainable hardwood, it's dubious". In 1999, the business hit £1m in turnover, and has grown 30% a year since. In 2006, he moved to a 50,000 sq ft workshop in Walthamstow. In line with his green credentials, he installed a biomass boiler that uses offcuts as fuel, which has cut the amount of waste going to landfill.
The only UK bedmaker certified by the Forest Stewardship Council for sustainability, Evans modestly says that he just "works hard to get the right product at the right price". But beneath that self-effacement is a shrewd businessman who has learned from his mistakes. "If you speak to an accountant, he'll say: 'Well, you'll save a lot of money if you cut your advertising'. Well, you will for the first three months. After that, you'll be finished. So we've turned it up."
