Gibbins targets UK domestic market

By Peter Marsh

Published in Financial Times: April 9 2008 02:40

Dawn Gibbins, one of the UK’s best-known female entrepreneurs, is shrugging off worries about an impending housing crisis with plans to set up a new company selling specialist flooring to upmarket homeowners.

Barefoot Living – whose employees will be expected to remove their shoes at the headquarters in Congleton, Cheshire – is aiming for sales of at least £50m ($98m) a year within five years, Ms Gibbins said on Tuesday.

Funds for setting up Barefoot are coming partly from the sale of Flowcrete, Ms Gibbins’s existing business, to RPM of the US for an estimated £35m.

Flowcrete makes plastic-based flooring systems for industrial and office use.

“This is a fantastic time to set up a new business,” said Ms Gibbins. “There’s a tremendous amount of money in the UK at the moment, in spite of the doom and gloom that you see being written about in the newspapers.”

She said trends towards healthier living, plus an increased interest in outdoor entertaining, would help stoke demand for Barefoot’s products. These will include specialist decorated flooring for areas such as patios, the surrounds of swimming pools and conservatories.

“In spite of talk of a recession, in much of the UK there is a ‘feelgood’ atmosphere, and I intend to capitalise on this,” Ms Gibbins added.

Most of the company’s sales will be made via dealers through franchise arrangements round the UK. But Barefoot will also seek to sell flooring outside the UK.

The company plans to have several hundred employees, including installers, within five years.

Ms Gibbins is to put £2m into starting up Barefoot, with the money coming from her 58 per cent share of Flowcrete, which she set up in 1982 with her father. Until the sale, Ms Gibbins was chairman of the company.

Flowcrete, which in recent years Ms Gibbins has run with her husband, Mark Greaves, last year made pre-tax profits of £3m on sales of £44m. Based in Cheshire, it has 12 plants round the world.

Under the deal with RPM, a materials business with sales last year of $3.3bn (£1.7bn), Flowcrete will be kept as a separate operation within the US company, with many of its top managers, including Mr Greaves, who had a 30 per cent stake in Flowcrete, keeping their jobs.