Developed from a family-owned wallpaper company founded in the 1970s, during the 1980s Coloroll Group became a dominant publicly listed home furnishings business, which collapsed in 1990 through excessive debt.
[1] After hiring marketing manager John Bray, he developed a strategy to move into wallpaper manufacture.
[1] To develop new overseas markets, Bray hired John Ashcroft from competitor Crown Wallpaper as export manager.
[1] The brands they bought included:[1] In 1988, the group paid £215 million for recently created clothing and carpet conglomerate John Crowther, which had not itself been fully integrated.
Coloroll sold this London firm of hatters to a management buy-out team called the Response Group.