Written by Andy Beresford - Co-Founder/Owner/Managing Director/Chief Arcade Machine Tester

 
I’m often asked how Home Leisure Direct began and why we do what we do, so here I tell our story right from the beginning up to now.

We’ve gone from nothing, starting from a £5k investment working in our spare bedroom to becoming the UK’s largest specialist games room retailer. It’s hard to know how we compare, as figures aren’t available for comparison, but we think we have the largest range of pool tables in the world, certainly we are the only retailer to be selling all of the world’s top brands. Along with the largest games room showrooms in Europe.

We currently operate from four converted barns, based in Elberton just north of Bristol, three of which comprise our showrooms. We also have a warehouse down the road in Avonmouth, as well as a number of storage hubs around the country to facilitate our logistics.

We now employ over 35 staff, which is a far cry from how we started with one woman and a dog.

 
So how did it all begin?

2007

I mentioned a dog. This is why we started Home Leisure Direct. We bought Charlie, our beloved Cocker Spaniel who was born on 21st June 2007. Michelle and I were both working full-time and stupidly thought that we could leave an eight week old puppy at home on his own all day. When Michelle had to go to work on the Monday and leave him she couldn’t do it, so phoned her boss and resigned. Faced with nothing to do we decided it would be a good idea to start a business that she could run from home.

Charlie - 2007 (Michelle couldn't leave him all alone at home)

Why pool tables? I had bought a pool table for my flat a year earlier. A beautiful Supreme Winner, in high gloss walnut (which you sadly can’t get any more). Buying this table had been a nightmare. I scoured the web and found rubbishy website after rubbishy website. Poor pictures, not much detail, most often no prices and a mobile number to call. One chap I rang for advice was at the checkout in Sainsbury’s and asked me to call him back. Not what I was expecting.

So, seeing this as a gap in the market we settled on selling leisure products for people’s homes, delivered to them directly. Hence the name Home Leisure Direct. We registered the company on 7th September 2007 and the journey began. I continued my full-time job and Michelle started doing all the research and laying the foundations. Charlie worked hard making a mess of the place and generally being a distraction.

Charlie wrecking the office - 2007

2008

Michelle sourced all the manufacturers/suppliers/distributors for the range of products we wanted to sell. She did an incredible job convincing all the companies to supply a start-up, with no website, no premises and no trading history to supply us. We were very fortunate, as the majority of companies simply will not supply any new businesses due to so many going bust over the years. We are very grateful to all those companies who backed us at the time, and who we are still happily trading with now.

We had a range of about 300 products across pool tables, football tables, table tennis tables, air hockey - all products we sell now. But we really had no idea what people would be wanting to buy, so we added a host of outdoor products too - trampolines, swings, climbing frames, jumbo chess sets, hammocks, giant bean bags, bouncy castles, pedal cars. All sorts of things.

Then came the hard work of listing all the products. We got all the info and photos, worked out all the pricing and margins and worked day and night, weekends and holidays to get it all listed and get the site live as soon as possible. We were finally up and running on 16th June 2008.

Our first Home Leisure Direct Website - 2008

2009

Christmas came and went. We went to New York for Valentine's Day and got engaged.

Trading was beyond our expectations and we were far busier than we expected. It was also harder work than we had hoped. Naively we thought customers would just place orders through the website, we would process the order and stuff would be delivered. But it wasn’t that simple. People kept on ringing up. The phone didn't stop. Michelle was so busy speaking to customers she was struggling to keep up with everything.

So we outsourced as much as we could - book-keeping, Adwords, PR, SEO, anything we could. This helped, but she was still maxed out. We also recruited our first member of staff - Dave. We wanted to add a range of pool table accessories but were too busy to list them all on the website so Michelle asked her long-time friend Dave if you could help us out for 2 weeks and list a load of pool balls and cues. Dave is still working for us now, managing the products on our website, all 2,000 of them.

I was still working full-time and spending every spare moment helping Michelle cope. We were working ridiculous hours, but had no choice as we were so busy. In September I left my job (long story) and joined HLD full-time. We had trebled our work-force (plus Charlie and new addition Frank-The-Dog!) and prepared for Christmas.

Frank joined the business to head up I.T. - 2009

2010

Christmas came and went again. We drew breath and then disappeared off for 8 weeks to get married in Las Vegas and travel the globe. Ben, a long-term friend, stepped up and ran everything while we were away. What a hero! Ben still works for us now, and is Head of Operations.

Andy and Michelle in Las Vegas, at the top of Stratosphere - 2010

Lots of the cheaper products were causing problems. They were poorly made, the delivery process was awful, and product was getting damaged, so we decided to only sell better quality more expensive commercial grade products, and adopted our policy of “only selling products we would be happy to own ourselves”. We culled nearly 50% of our range.

We re-designed the website, upgraded it to operate a back-office ordering system, and added more high-end products to replace all the stuff we had ceased. These were two masterstrokes. The business was more focussed, customers could see what we specialised in and processing orders was easier and our average ticket price doubled.

Wonderfully cheesy PR photo which Michelle will kill me for using, it's never before seen the light of day - 2010

Despite starting trading in the midst of the credit crunch we had managed to get the business off the ground. Sales were strong, double last year, and everything was progressing well.

2011

I was offered some exciting consulting work, too good to turn down, but I managed to negotiate working just 3 days a week so I could cover HLD for 2 days, plus weekends if needed. It was time to get an office/showroom and some sales staff.

Michelle found a wonderful location, easy to get to from both the M4 and M5 and avoiding getting potential customers stuck in Bristol’s worsening traffic. It was a converted barn, which had space to display some pool tables and a separate room for a sales office.

Our First Showroom: The Long Byre - 2011

We recruited 4 staff, three of whom are not with us any longer, but the one who remains is Roger, who is now our Sales Manager. It took him two interviews to convince us, but what a great hire he has turned out to be! I did about 6 weeks of consulting and didn’t enjoy all the driving (amongst other things), so I stopped and once again devoted all my energies to HLD.

Again we are very grateful to all our suppliers who were kind enough to “loan” us all our display products, as we couldn’t afford to buy anything having bought desks, computers, phone system and everything else. All of a sudden we had a proper business, with premises, staff and lots and lots of customers.

2012

We found that customers were looking for more expensive pool dining tables, made from solid wood in a range of designs, so Michelle searched the web for potential suppliers around the world. I flew out to meet with quite a few different companies and agreed partnerships with a number of amazing manufacturers, many of whom have become great friends.

With such a fantastic range of amazing products we needed more room to display them all. A neighbouring unit had become available, another converted barn. So we took the plunge and added another showroom, ordered a huge range of stock and had far more room to display everything.

Our Second Showroom: Ida's Barn - 2012

We also agreed our first licenses. The first was Jack Daniel’s, who we continue to enjoy working with on a wonderful range of products, which we are currently adding to. We also signed agreements with a number of Premier League football clubs to be their official merchandise partner for pool cloths, the first of which was Chelsea.

Andy, Michelle and the Team (Dave M, Charlotte, Roger and Dave L), outside Ida's Barn - 2012

2013

Having done so much in the last two years we decided to try to slow down a little and solidify what we had done. That never quite happened. We continued to add new suppliers, great new products and increase our staff numbers. By now we had Roger and Dave selling, Abi had joined to run our marketing. Charlotte was doing our admin, Dave was still running the website, and Michelle was able to step back and work on some other projects.

We won our first award, kindly chosen by ECMOD Direct Commerce. We took the whole team to London to Chelsea Football Club where the presentation was taking place, along with Andy and Jim from Bluebox. We had an awesome night and celebrated our first award in style.

The team at the ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards - 2013

Left to right: Jim, Dermot, Charlotte, Abi, Roger, Andrew, Andy, Michelle, Dave L

2014

This was another great year for us, winning not just one award - we won four! The first was the ECMOD Direct Commerce award for Best Website. This was followed by the Federation of Small Business award for Best Online Business, an incredible achievement given we were up against over 900 other entrants.

Then in September we won two more awards at the E-Commerce Awards for Best Leisure and Entertainment and also Best Small E-Commerce Retailer of the Year. What an amazing sweep, testament to all the hard work the team had put into developing HLD into a genuinely industry leading company.

Andy and Dave at the eCommerce Awards - 2014

We added another member to our sales team, Ted joined us in September - his real name is Andy, but having two Andys can get confusing, so he kindly re-named himself Ted. We promptly desserted him and Roger and I disappeared off to exhibit at Decorex - a show held in London aimed at interior designers. We had a great time, but I suffered an attack of gout(!) and ended up hobbling about in quite a bit of pain. I had to abstain from any beer, much to Roger's amusement, although he did allow me to sniff his pint.

2014 was a nice straightforward year. It was the calm before the storm…

2015

This year was a bit crazy. We had outgrown our existing office, we had 7 staff for 6 desks, so our new administrator Liz was having to sit at a pool dining table. Not ideal. The company in a neighbouring unit had sold, so it was vacant. So we added the Old Parlour, to our existing units - Long Byre and Ida’s Barn. After a quick refurb we moved in during January.

We were exceptionally busy and struggling to keep up, so we recruited quite a few staff very quickly - Scott joined marketing, Josh joined to start our commercial department, Ben (who had run things while we got married in 2010) joined as Head of Operations. Fallon, Stef, Mike, Stu and Dima joined in sales. Ben K joined to repair pinballs and Jono joined to run our video work. Rob joined the accounts team. We also added two apprentices - Jess started in marketing and Lisa joined in accounts. Our head count had gone from 9 to 22 in just 6 months.

With all these staff we didn’t have enough room in our new office, so we had to get more space. There was one building remaining “vacant” on the business park - a tractor shed. I convinced our landlords to let us have it and they applied for planning permission. This came through in May. By August we had converted it into an additional 2,000 sq ft showroom, put the sales office back into Long Byre and had space for marketing and accounts in Old Parlour.

Carter's Barn Opening Event - 2015

Left to right: Dima, Jono, Josh, Fallon, Dave M, Rob, Jess, Michelle, Ted, Frank, Stu, Charlie, Roger, Andy, Reece, Ben, Charlotte, Dave, Abi, Scott, Ben K

In the midst of this we continued to rack up the awards. We won Best Website at the ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards.

ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards, Roger with his now legendary "far away" look of a blind man - 2015

We also won Best Leisure, Entertainment and Sport at the E-Commerce Awards - this came with our must unusual acceptance photo yet!

Host Danny Wallace encouraged us to go for an unconventional pose - 2015

I had been in talks with Selfridges about opening a concession for most of the year, we opened at the end of October on the Tech floor, in between Apple and Carphone Warehouse. Josh and Reece went to run it and we rented a flat for them to stay in. More recruitment - we added four staff for the concession. We were a big hit with the Selfridges clientele, inducing a number of celebrities.

Ben (Head of Operations) with Sean Bean, which he won't stop going on about: "The time I met Sean Bean..." - 2015

Christmas was incredibly busy, so much so our outsourced logistics operation fell over on December 11th. I got the call from them saying they couldn’t pick the pool tables quickly enough in the warehouse and didn’t have enough vans to deliver everything.  This would have left nearly 200 customers without their purchases for Christmas. So we hired 4 vans and took half our staff on the road and had them delivering pool tables all over the country morning, noon and night. Never have we experienced so much stress, but the team were amazing. Everyone pitched in, pulled together and worked extremely hard. By the time Christmas day arrived we were all glad of the day off.

2016

After the stressful Christmas and non-functioning outsourced warehouse and logistics operation we decided that doing our own deliveries was the only way forward. Having switched companies three times as we grew we had run out of options for companies to handle this type of large heavy product and service our customers properly. So we found a warehouse in Avonmouth and moved in during January. Dave moved from the sales team to run things. We hired a team, bought two vans and a forklift, and we were in business.

The company had being growing rapidly and had gained much attention due to our high profile from all the awards we had won and partnerships with the world’s top brands, our licenses and our concession in Selfridges. We decided to accept an offer of private equity investment with George joining myself and Michelle as a shareholder.

The awards continued to flow, with us winning another four this year: Best Website and Best Home and Garden at the E-Commerce Awards, we won the Federation of Small Business award for Best Online Business again, and we won Best Website again at the ECMOD Direct Commerce awards.

Andy and Ben at the ECMOD Awards - 2016

Our staff numbers continued to grow with Amy going into accounts and Nic taking over pinball repairs. Andy H took over managing logistics with Matt supervising the warehouse. Christmas was much less stressful, we were able to deliver everything on time without any of the drama. Our delivery team, consisting of Phil, Ryan, Stu, Matt, Cameron and Pat plus a host of others did an amazing job.

2017

Following our private equity investment the previous year we strengthened our finance side with Anthony joining as part-time Finance Director. Lewis and Harriet joined our sales team. Jakub joined marketing, Craig came in to manage our route planning, Joe and Frank joined as finance apprentices, replacing Lisa who left for uni.

The awards continued to come in, with us receiving a Feefo Gold Award for our customer service. We won the FSB Award for Best Online Business for the South West, and we won Best Home Entertainment at the Direct Commerce Awards. We are also finalists in the E-Commerce awards being held later in September.

We continued to add to our unrivalled range of pool table manufacturers, signing exclusive agreements with two of the largest pool table manufacturers in the world - Joy Billiards who make the incredible Chinese 8 Ball tables and Rasson who supply the tables for the world’s most prestigious American 9 ball competitions - the Mosconi Cup, World Cup of Pool and World Pool Masters.

We’ve added another van to our fleet, installed a huge mezzanine floor in our warehouse to allow us to hold more stock, and further strengthened our delivery team to be able to cope with demand. Our total headcount is now 31. We are extremely fortunate to employ such an amazing team of people across such a diverse number of roles. Without these incredible guys and girls we couldn’t source, transport, display, sell, install and service all these fantastic products to all our customers.

2018

2018 was a big year of change for the company with us seeing team shake ups across the board, as well as the official launch of one of the biggest projects the team have even undertaken - Contactless Payment Pool Tables. We also created a completely new operations department to help make ordering and delivery easier and smoother for both us and our customers, meaning we had to come up with yet another office somewhere. Thankfully we had just the space, and the new operations team got to move in towards the end of the year made up of Harriet, Ted and new member Kayla.

The rate of awards coming to the company showed little signs of slowing down, with us winning another three throughout the year. This included another eCommerce award, another ECMOD award and the incredible Feefo Gold Trusted Service award, meaning that our review score had achieved an overall score of over 95%!

One of the biggest events of the year came with a big new invention courtesy of our commercial sales team (which also got bigger with the addition of European Pool Champion Ben Flack) who were able to pioneer and introduce contactless payment to commercial pool tables, including the creation of the world's first ever commercial grade pool dining table.

2019

As you've began to realise there is never a dull moment. We pushed on with our product development for the commercial sector - putting our contactless reader into a pub style pool table - the Signature Tournament, winning a number of large contracts with both pub chains and specialists independents. This then led to us developing the world's first dual payment pool table, taking both coins and contactless payments.

We exhibited at the National Holiday Park Show for the first time, pictured below.  We also attended a number of hospitality industry events - the Propel Summer Conference and the Bar and Nightclub Conference. We supplied all the shuffleboards to Electric Shuffle, which opened in November.

(Holiday Park Show - From left to right: Josh, Andy, Ben and Adam)

The awards continued to come in - we won the Direct Commerce Best Home Entertainment award and the Feefo Gold Award for our customer service, for scoring over 95% for the whole year.

By now we had run out of warehouse space and were borrowing from friends continually, so we had to get somewhere permanent. As luck would have it our nextdoor neighbours moved out of their warehouse in Avonmouth, so we took that space on a permanent basis, giving us room to breathe, and the space to run all our commercial work from.

2020

I write this whilst we are in the midst of the corona-virus pandemic. As we started the year little did we know all our grand plans would be so drastically disrupted. 

January kicked off with us winning the first-ever Feefo Platinum award, for companies that have achieved over 95% review scores for 3 years consecutively - we were all super chuffed.

We ran our first ever event - Competitive Socialising 2020, organised by us, with a lot of help from Jade Craig (Inntegra), partnering with hospitality industry leaders RSM and Incite. The aim being to pull all the key players from this rapidly growing sector together, to share market intelligence and best practice, with insights from the key players. It was huge success, with over 300 attendees. Read more...

(Competitive Socialising 2020 Event. Venue: Sway, Holborn, London - Feb 2020)

Shortly after the event, we went into lockdown. We closed the showrooms and everyone worked from home, as the situation worsened we placed the majority of the staff on furlough, with the logistics department closed. We continued to trade incredibly well, with people keen to entertain themselves whilst stuck at home - staying in truly became the new going out!

As I write this now, in late May, we have re-started our logistics, and manufacturers have started to re-open, but at reduced capacity due to social distancing. Our retail side, supplying customer's homes is busier than ever, leading to us being featured on the BBC website and on Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show. Our commercial side remains mothballed, awaiting the much-anticipated re-opening of the pub sector.

And Now...

Who knows what the rest of the year will bring. I usually fill this space each year with our plans, but we currently take each day as it comes. Our priority is the safety of our team and our customers. There is talk of a "new normal" but I think that is hard to define, as we hopefully come through to the other side of this dreadful disease. Stay home, stay safe, have Serious Fun...

Have a look around our showrooms...