Carpet wars go to the mattresses: Upstart Tapi takes the fight to Carpetright

Martin Harris
Martin Harris remains bullish about Tapi's future, in spite of the company not yet making a profit

Martin Harris has been dashing about carpet shops too much to spend time with his three-year-old grandson lately. “I’m in the bad books at the moment,” the 49-year-old boss of carpet chain Tapi says sheepishly.

Harris is aware of family duties more than most. He is indebted to his father, “Carpet King” Baron Harris of Peckham, for his career in the retail industry. He sold his first item – a doormat – when he was just five years old and spent his wistful teenage years as a shop assistant in his father’s store instead of going to music concerts. “It was child labour,” he laughs. 

His father first became involved in retail at 15 years old, in 1957, when he was put in charge of the family’s Peckham market stall and two shops. He built the business into Harris Queensway, before selling it in 1988. That was the start of Carpetright, where Harris junior worked for 23 years. But that was before he fell out with Carpetright’s management four years ago, cashed in his shares and swiftly set up a rival flooring business, Tapi, which has been blamed for pulling the rug from under the family’s former firm.

Carpetright has blamed Tapi’s “intensified competition” from its founder’s son for its recent troubles, but the company is paranoid about speaking about the battle between the two firms. A nervous PR attempts to cancel the interview at the mention of Carpetright rivalry, until it’s pointed out that it’s impossible not to, given Harris spent half his life there.

“I felt that I was suggesting a lot of things and none of those things were getting on the table and moving forward,” Harris says about his last days at Carpetright. “And if you do that for long enough you think ‘why am I here?’ Eventually they said ‘do you want to go?’ and I said ‘I do, I’m really not enjoying it,’ and so they said ‘Go’.” 

Harris, a yoga novice at the time, set himself a Bikram challenge, requiring him to contort his body every day for a month in a heated studio in Canary Wharf, where he realised that sloping off to the other side of the world wasn’t an option and a return to retail beckoned.

“People had said ‘why don’t you do flooring?’ and I realised there were a load of things that I could still do,” he says.

His goal is to make carpet shopping more than a necessary chore. He has made Tapi’s new shops more inviting, with artwork, sofas and its own scent, piped in to seduce shoppers and put them in a calm mood.

A soundtrack of spa-style tunes plays in the background before the sudden interruption of a shouting “Underlay, underlay!” jingle; a toe-curling carpet pun on the “Andale, andale!” catchphrase once used by cartoon Mexican mouse Speedy Gonzales.

“It’s OK the first time you hear it, but by the end of the day it drives you nuts,” Harris admits. Since launching Tapi four years ago, with financial backing from his father, British textile manufacturer Sir Harry Djanogly and Lord Kirkham, the founder of furniture brand DFS, the company has been opening shops at breakneck speed. It has 114 stores but is now slowing the pace. Despite declaring last year that the business would be profitable by the end of 2018, Tapi is still to make a profit.

The company’s most recent accounts reveal it made a loss of £11m last year, although sales had doubled from £30m to £57m. Around £40m of funds has been pumped in. Harris argues that if the chain had halted its opening programme it would have been able to turn a profit much earlier, but it has ploughed money into stores instead.

There is a two-month lag before Tapi books revenues from new stores, he explains, as it only counts sales once carpets have been fitted. “We’re now two and a half years old, and on the basis of that and everything that has happened in the world I think that Tapi has been pretty close to doing what it said it would,” Harris says. “We are bang in line with where we thought we would be, we’re on our way to profitability,” he adds.  The brutal retail market has made it even tougher for the new entrant.

Harris is conscious that carpets are a “big ticket” purchase – the first area of retail to come under pressure when consumer spending is squeezed.

However, unlike Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley, who claimed that a tough November was “smashing retailers to pieces”, Harris was “delighted” by last month’s trading. “After such a hot summer, which we know isn’t the best weather to encourage people to buy carpets, we’ve had a recovery with a bang.”

Harris claims that Tapi has been performing better than the broader furniture market with positive like-for-like sales. If that is true it probably means trading has got even worse for Carpetright, which recently reported a 8.9pc sales decline.  The tough retail backdrop, a clutch of expensive loss-making stores and an aggressive new entrant almost pushed Carpetright to the wall this year.

The UK’s market leader had to launch a £60m rights issue and push through a company voluntary arrangement to shed 60 stores to give it a fighting chance.

Carpetright
The tough retail backdrop, a clutch of expensive loss-making stores and an aggressive new entrant almost pushed Carpetright to the wall this year

Carpetright sources have accused the Harris family of using their inside knowledge to open Tapi stores directly adjacent to its rival’s best stores, which Harris denies, although evidence suggests otherwise. 

“We looked at Waitrose towns actually, not Carpetright stores,” he says tetchily. “We felt like this proposition was more suited to a discerning customer.”

“I’m not pitting us against them,” Harris argues. “It’s a big market, I’m not competing with just them … If that’s what Wilf [Walsh, Carpetright boss] thinks, that’s what Wilf thinks”, and for a moment his yogic calm evaporates. 

“A lot of sane people will see that, and we have other competitors to them like ScS – we aren’t the only two national flooring brands that exist and there’s lots of mamas and papas shops out there too”.

To prove his point, just two minutes away from the Tapi shop on an Orpington retail park is an odd gaggle of flooring shops including a gloomy Carpetright shop, together with cheaper, smaller rivals Trendy Flooring, Carpet4Less and Carpet Giant, all squashed in one corner. So how would he feel if Carpetright went bust?

Would he view it as an opportunity to snap up stores, as speculated, or feel a pang of sadness about the death of a former family business?

“I’m still focused on my new business, that’s my focus,” he says. “I can’t remember the last time that I was in a Carpetright store.”

License this content