Steve Forder has enjoyed an exciting and successful career in interior décor, and now believes it’s time to give something back
Steve Forder started his career in interiors mixing paint, as his teenage Saturday job, and must have found a charm in the joy of helping people’s interior décor dreams come true, as over the next three decades he built a career working with some of the most successful and well-known brands on the planet, becoming an expert in the buying and selling of high-end textiles and furnishings. His final move was as MD at Clarke & Clarke, the independent interior retailer founded by Cheshire couple Lee and Emma Clarke, which was snapped up by interior design behemoth brands Sandersons in 2016. Clarke and Clarke was the reason Steve moved to Cheshire, but the seed of an idea to launch his own business was the reason he stayed.
‘I worked in high end fabrics and wallcoverings my entire working life,’ he says. ‘I have calculated that in the last 15 years of my employment I sold over 40m metres of fabric into the UK trade. As time went on, I could see there was huge consumption, but no real care for sustainability. It seems right, at this point, to give back a little.’
While nobody can argue that sustainability is something we all understand to be a good thing, a step towards at least maintaining, if not proactively benefitting, our planet, it’s not a simple thing for any huge organisation to achieve. Even the smallest steps can have a negative affect elsewhere within the business.
‘If you want to add a sustainable range to your existing collection, you by definition make all the rest of your collection not sustainable. It’s a very tough thing to try to do when your business manages the buying and selling of millions of metres of fabric a year.’
With the majority of manufacturers simply not geared up for the mass production of sustainable products (and sustainable and mass production aren’t easy words to fit into the same sentence) where does one start if one wants to launch a wholly sustainable business that has wide appeal? The answer – by looking at the challenge from a new direction.
‘It became clear to me that if I wanted to produce and sell beautiful, sustainably made products, it would have to be direct to the consumer, not via an established retailer or brand. There are many benefits to this approach, the greatest being we don’t have to develop a full pattern book, with dozens of separate lines and options – there's a lot of waste in such an exercise, but it’s very much the way of the industry.
‘Also, it’s really only by starting a new business we can properly embrace the sustainable aspect; from a zero start we are able in all our categories to either find the most sustainable version of the necessary components, ignore that product type until there are sustainable options, or develop our own and bring it to market.’
Steve’s business, the aptly named The Pure Edit, is the equivalent of an online interiors department store, with categories from textiles and wallcoverings to paints, soft furnishings, furniture and bedlinens. And every single category has been put together with a sustainable focus, making it unique in the marketplace at this time.
‘The entire range is put together from the bottom up, with no compromise, giving customers the opportunity to put together a décor scheme that is wholly sustainable. The most sustainable thing we can do is to buy nothing new. The next stage is buy something that is made with sustainable materials, in a sustainable method and that lasts and lasts.’
It doesn’t hurt that The Pure Edit consists of wholly beautiful pieces you can quite easily imagine into your own home, a carefully curated collection of designs and colours that won’t date and will bring great pleasure for years and years. Browsing the website is a joy. Too many sites expect the home decorator to have a clear idea of what they want, or present tiny photos of pieces you are hard-pressed to imagine at full size or across a whole wall. Here, inspiration abounds in stunning photography, and if you spot a room scheme you love, it’s made easy to find the pieces within it.
There’s a lot to take in, with, Steve says, over 35,000 product images on the site. Where on earth did he start?
“It isn’t really difficult as long as you employ the right people,” he laughs. “I started with two textile designers, Laura Major and Jess Fox, one who is brilliant at hand-drawing and painting and the other great with CAD. They have designed all the fabrics and wallcoverings on our site – and have put up all the 35,000 images; they deserve a medal.’
Finding the right people is one thing, but it seems finding the right businesses to partner with on his dream project was a whole other challenge.
“The most difficult thing was finding the right mills to produce what we want, in the way we want it produced. This has been one of our biggest challenges.
“Sadly, there aren’t a lot of mills in the UK that can produce what we want at an accessible, affordable price. We don’t want to pass along high overheads to our customers, but equally we aren’t prepared to go long-haul to find mills, that goes completely against our ethos. We started our search in the UK, then spread the net into Europe.
“The furthest afield we have gone is Turkey, and everything we have made there is then shipped here by road, not by air. This is where we buy all our weaves and velvets, which are made with 100% recycled polyester. We only use Repreve yarn, which is absolutely the best available. It’s a fantastic performer – durable, colourfast, and all made from recycled plastic bottles.
“All our cotton fabrics are organic, and we have these printed in Spain, using a digital printer with latex ink, so all natural and zero run-off. We also use a recycled cotton, from pre-consumer waste. These are leftovers from print runs, the unused yarn that would normally be put into landfill. Growing cotton is hard on the environment, so to waste unused cotton yarn is terrible. Somebody spotted an opportunity, and we’re benefitting from it.”
This is the start of the virtuous circle that businesses such as Steve’s can only strengthen. A growing demand for sustainably sourced, made and deliver products will support a growing number of businesses ready and able to supply them.
“‘The more orders we place, the more demands we make that factories respond to, the more they will produce and offer for sale to other retailers, and so the circle expands,’ Steve says.
If you build it, they will come, you might say. As the volume of demand grows, so will the facility to manufacture at equitable costs, which can be passed to the consumer, who then wants more, and so on and so on.
“Our furniture is all made in the UK,” Steve says, with a note of pride. “We were recommended to approach a small furniture company on the south coast who were apparantly keen to start moving in a more sustainable direction – and then there we were ready to offer them the opporunity to do just that. They build all our furniture without any use of foam. Instead we use latex [which comes from rubber trees] and coconut fibres, both wholly natural and sustainable alternatives, along with timber frames and steel springs. Even the flame-retardant coatings (a legal requirement) have reached the point where we are comfortable with their use.’
The Pure Edit even has a paint collection, a carefully curated range of 50 shades, mixed to order in the UK (just up the road in fact, in south Manchester) water-based, low in VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds, which can leach into the environment for up to five years after application of the paint) and child- and pet-friendly.
‘Our paints are mixed in the same place we have our wallpapers printed,’ he says. ‘The tins are bare, silver steel with a minimal label and the handles are recycled materials. Sadly it is required that paint sent direct to the customer must be wrapped in a plastic bag, with a cable tie – but the cable tie we use is recyclable. All the rest of the packaging we use is recycled and recyclable, our bedding comes in potato starch wrap rather than plastic - we even came up with a way to avoid that cellophane wrap you get on most wallpaper rolls. We print to demand, and run the printer a short length more at the end of the print, applying the hanging instructions to that bit, then use dabs of the same glue your credit card is stuck to the letter than accompanies it to close the roll. No plastic, no non-recyclable waste.’
Building from the ground up means Steve has considered every detail of every aspect of his business, but now he has built it – will the customer come?
‘We have definitely seen an increase in consumer demand for sustainable, kind to the environment, furnishings and furniture. It’s a younger age group, with greater awareness and concern for the lifecycle of the planet. We have been very careful in the development of all our ranges that we create collections that don’t cost any more than the equivalent, not sustainable collections found elsewhere.
‘If it’s beautiful, easy to live with, easy to buy, and doesn’t cost more than the not-sustainable version, why wouldn’t you choose it?’
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