Furniture

New furniture was the first consumer durable to be successfully diffused to a mass (middle- and working-class) market in Britain. This chapter charts how a small number of furniture retailers pioneered many of the techniques used to create British mass markets for consumer durables. The key innovator was Benjamin Drage, who devised a successful formula to sell suites of new furniture, and the consumer credit used to purchase them, to ‘Mr Everyman’, using a revolutionary national advertising campaign. Drage’s spectacular early success is shown to have inspired emulation and adaption not just by furniture retailers, but by suppliers of other consumer durables. This chapter shows how furniture retailers managed to convince millions of working-and lower-middle-class families that buying their furniture new and furnishing out of income was not only practicable but constituted the cornerstone of modern aspirational lifestyles.