18 entrepreneurs Designing his way to a successful career
Sean Sutcliffe is one of the UK’s best-known and most respected furniture makers. His business, Benchmark Furniture, employs some 59 designers and craftsmen at its operations in Berkshire and Dorset and has a turnover of around £4 million. From its early days the business has expanded into a full service design studio and furniture showroom, working not just with wood, but also bespoke metalworking. Some 75% of Benchmark’s work is now in the commercial sector and the team works with many of the world's top architects and designers on a range of projects, fitting and furnishing offices, hotels, bars, restaurants and public buildings. Among its most high-profile commissions have been the iconic 30 St Mary Axe (better known as The Gherkin), the Eden Project and the Vodafone World Headquarters. What he really yearns to do next, however, is build a wooden bridge and spend time with the woodworkers of Kyoto. Alison Dewar finds out more
Sean Sutcliffe is co-founder and managing director of Benchmark Furniture, which has its headquarters in Kintbury, near Newbury. The son of an army pilot, he spent his formative years living overseas, including a spell in Alabama, USA, before returning to boarding school in England. By the time he left aged 18, he knew the more traditional careers of lawyer, banker or accountant were not for him and it was only when he spent a day actually “making something” that he knew he had found his vocation as a craftsman. He set his sights on attending the world- renowned Parnham College of Furniture Makers, a centre of excellence for furniture design, and spent the next three years “getting his hands dirty” by running his own small carpentry business, fitting kitchens and making cupboards in London, while he saved enough money to pay his college fees. Having achieved his goal of attending Parnham, the college not only gave him the skills and business foundation for his stellar design career, but it also introduced him to his future business partner Sir Terence Conran. The rest, as they say, is history. Sutcliffe is married with six sons – one who has just joined the business as an apprentice – and lives in Wiltshire.
in the workshop and he became a very good friend, which he still is today. After a couple of years, I decided I wanted my own business, but Terence said “this is your workshop”, so we shook hands over the table and with a shared ownership agreement Benchmark was born in 1984.
What was the most important lesson he taught you?
Do what you want to do and always do things to the best of your ability. If you do it well, then success and money will follow.
Sir Terence Conran has clearly been a major influence on your career. Tell us more about how you set up the business
We met when Terence came to do a talk at Parnham, we got on well and he asked me to work for him. He had an old stable block on his farm at Kintbury which had been the original Habitat HQ and we turned it into a workshop with an investment of £6,000. To start with I was working on prototype furniture designs for Terence’s businesses – Habitat, Heals, the Conran shop in the Fulham Road.
It was the heady days of
the mid-80s so he was very busy, but we spent every Saturday working together
www.businessmag.co.uk How did you take the “next big step”?
Terence asked me if I wanted to work on Bibendum, his famous restaurant in London, which was a wonderful opportunity.
It was
my first step into commercial woodworking and from there, given that the restaurant world is quite small and everyone knows everyone, quite quickly I began getting other commissions for restaurants and hotels and built my reputation. I never had any great business plans, I was always more interested in making things rather than making money, but the business just evolved from there. Of course, I did have to learn that if you don’t make money then you don’t have a workshop and you don’t have
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – OCTOBER 2012
a business, but I always regarded profit as a bit like electricity. As long as it is there, I don’t notice it, I have a modest lifestyle and as long as I have enough to invest back into the business in new machinery or new buildings, then I’m happy. Apart from the original investment everything else has come from our own resources, we’ve never
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