Bensons for Beds enjoys best results since acquisition, says CEO

The beds specialist saw gross ordered sales increase 4% to £324.8m for the 52 weeks to 27 September 2025, with adjusted EBITDA reaching £4.8m – a £5.7m year-on-year improvement. 

The results mark the 13th consecutive quarterly sales growth, and the retailer said the momentum had carried on to FY26 with its performance in the first four months of the new financial year surpassing the 4% recorded in 2025, and EBITDA also ahead of last year.

The improved performance is significant for the retailer, which has been in a turnaround phase since it was bought out of administration in 2019 by investment group Alteri. 

Speaking to Retail Week about its results, Bensons chief executive Collard said: “I’m really pleased. First and foremost, after some difficult years, this is the best result the business has had since its acquisition by Alteri back in 2019. And it’s not a flash in the pan – it’s the culmination of consistent progress and the work the teams have put in.”

“The first thing I’m particularly proud of is underpinned by a key strategic pillar we call ‘Unlocking the Power of Our People’. We wanted Benson’s to be a colleague-led business, and that’s really coming to the fore. In a world where footfall continues to be challenging, our store teams have been driving up conversion and average transaction value – not by charging more, but by doing a genuinely good job of helping customers find the right product.

“The second, and the one I’m probably most proud of, is gaining our ‘Great Place to Work’ accreditation. That’s a real proof point. We’re a retailer, but also a manufacturer and a distributor – getting over that threshold across all those functions was something we were genuinely delighted by.

“The third area is customer experience – that was the real challenge facing the business four or five years ago. Now, our store NPS is in the nineties, our delivery NPS – measured at the point of delivery into customers’ homes – has never been higher, sitting in the high eighties. But the one I find most compelling is Trustpilot, where we have a score of 4.7 based on 300,000 reviews, and the trend is improving.”

Bensons added 21 new stores to its estate during the period, including a return to London’s famous home and furniture shopping street Tottenham Court Road. 

“We’re reacquiring national scale,” said Collard.

“We used to have around 230 stores, came down to about 150-160, and our view is there’s absolutely room nationally to get back to 200-plus. We’re at around 179 at the moment, and our ambition is to open at least another 25 stores over the next year to two years.

“Because the business historically didn’t have the capital to reinvest into the estate, we’re now going back to reimagine and refurbish a number of those stores and bring them up to the right standard. We’re already seeing encouraging returns from that, which is making us think about how we take it further.

“Finally, there’s the question of what the next version of a Benson’s store looks like altogether. The store journey remains absolutely fundamental to our proposition. Whilst we want to keep building the digital business, and there’s clearly a place for customers who prefer to transact online, the store is the crux of what we do.”