Bisley

About

Bisley is a British furniture manufacturer headquartered in Newport, South Wales, producing steel and wood storage, lockers, desking, shelving and seating for workplaces and homes. The business dates to 1931. The company began as F C Brown, a one-man car body repair business opened in 1931 by Freddy Brown, a panel beater, in Woking, Surrey. In 1941 the operation moved to a larger site at the Surrey village of Bisley, which later supplied the company name, and manufactured jerry cans and the steel containers used to drop supplies by parachute to airborne forces, work commended by the Ministry of Defence. After the war a switch to steel wastepaper bins moved the firm into office equipment, and steel storage became its main output. Freddy Brown's son, Anthony "Tony" Brown, joined the business in 1960 and later bought it from his father on the founder's retirement. The trading company, Bisley Office Equipment Limited, was incorporated in April 1961. In 1988 Bisley acquired a 17-acre site at Caswell Way on the Reevesland Industrial Estate in Newport, now its head office and principal factory, and the company received the Queen's Award for Export Achievement in 1992 and again in 1997. In 2022 Anthony Brown established an Employee Ownership Trust and gifted 51 per cent of the company's shares to the workforce, then numbering around 500 people worldwide. The businesses trade collectively as The Bisley Group, which also takes in the seating maker Thomas Montgomery, founded in 1975 as an upholsterer training centre, and BeSmart, a smart locker service. Design is led by Chris Fowler, the group's lead designer, at a Newport plant where more than 300 people work in product development and manufacturing. Output runs to more than 15,000 items a week, made largely to order to limit overproduction and waste, and reaches more than 75 countries. Annual production of steel storage products has fallen from around 20,000 tonnes to about 7,000 as the company has taken on wood, laminate, plastics, upholstery and soft furnishings alongside steel. The catalogue is organised into lockers, storage systems, zoning products including planters, height-adjustable and fixed desking, desk storage and pedestals, shelving, seating and booths, and the Bisley Home range. The company holds ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001 and ISO 45001 certification along with FSC chain of custody, sources renewable electricity backed by REGO certificates, and received a Manufacturing Guild Mark from the Furniture Makers' Company in 2015. The MultiDrawer, created in 1958 by Freddy Brown, is the design most closely associated with the company. Brown took the office letter tray as his starting point and built around it a steel cabinet of shallow, fully removable drawers, each front carrying a label holder, in sizes that sit on a desktop or beneath a table. More than two million have been sold, and the design received a Design Guild Mark from the Furniture Makers' Company in 2017. Buddy, designed by Chris Fowler and given a Design Guild Mark in 2022, is a personal storage unit fixed to the underside of a desktop so that it rises and falls with a height-adjustable work surface. The Hideaway collection, also by Fowler, took the company's fourth and fifth Design Guild Marks in 2023 and comprises a wall desk that folds away in the manner of a bureau and a swing desk that converts a sideboard into a work surface. Bisley furniture is specified for offices and corporate headquarters and, through its locker and storage ranges, for education, health, hotel, retail, entertainment and wellness settings, while the Bisley Home range is directed at domestic interiors. The group operates showrooms and offices in London, Manchester, Bray in County Wicklow, New York, Dusseldorf, Tilburg and Dubai. Products are available through the brand's official website and its dealer network, and a direct-to-consumer online shop was launched in 2018. Bisley is a long-established British manufacturer of steel and wood storage, lockers and workplace furniture, producing at its Newport factory under a majority employee-owned structure.