Arabella Designs

Arabella Designs is a UK furniture brand selling handmade bespoke sofas, corner sofas and made-to-measure pieces, now alongside beds, mattresses, armchairs, coffee tables and lighting. Every sofa comes with a 20-year frame guarantee, free UK delivery and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

The sofas sit at the luxury end of the market: on the website today they run from £1,250 to £3,550. Customers can order free fabric samples, visit the showroom in Manchester, or book a 20-minute virtual walkthrough with an advisor.

Arabella Designs came to Castle turning over about £300,000 a year. The product was good. The reviews were strong. The problem was the route from an advert to a sale.

Nobody spends two or three thousand pounds on a sofa they’ve only seen on a phone. They want to feel the fabric, see the colour in their own light, and sit on it if they can. That makes a luxury sofa a two-step sale: first a free sample or a showroom visit, then the order. Any marketing that measures itself only on immediate online sales will undervalue the first step and starve the second.

So the brief was to build the whole journey, not just buy more clicks: a website that turns interest into sample orders and showroom visits, and advertising that fills it.

Castle rebuilt the entire Shopify store with one job in mind: convert more of the visitors who arrive. The rebuilt site makes the two first steps as easy as buying a product.

• Free samples up front. Customers choose a fabric range, pick colours and order six samples free, with the team following up afterwards. Links to the samples page appear throughout the site, and each one is tagged with where it was clicked, so the team can see which pages start the most sample requests.
• The showroom, online. A booking page for showroom visits sits next to a 20-minute virtual walkthrough. Its form asks which day and time suit the customer, and which product they want to see.
• Reasons to trust, on every page. The 14-day money-back guarantee, 20-year frame guarantee, free UK delivery and handmade-in-the-UK promise sit in a strip under the header, with Trustpilot in the top bar.

Castle runs Arabella Designs’ Google Ads and Meta Ads. Google captures people already searching for luxury, corner and bespoke sofas. Meta puts the furniture in front of people furnishing a home who haven’t started searching yet.

The Meta creative leans on the two things that persuade a careful buyer: rooms that look like real homes, and proof from other customers. The ads below ran from late 2024 into 2025, with Trustpilot ratings on the image and headlines such as “4.8 Stars on Trustpilot—Loved by Our Customers”. Other versions put a price on it (“Sofas starting from £1,700. Corner sofas starting from £3,000”) or invite people to the Manchester showroom.

Because the sample and the showroom visit are the real first conversions, the campaigns are judged on them as well as on orders. A campaign that produces sample orders is doing its job even when the sofa sale lands a few weeks later.

Free samples cost Arabella Designs a little postage and a few squares of fabric. In return, a customer has the brand’s fabric in their living room, in their light, for as long as they like. That’s a far stronger position than a closed browser tab. It’s cheap, and it works.

Sample orders have grown by 30% month on month, and the showroom does the same job for customers who want to sit before they buy. Between them they turn a stranger into someone who has touched the product, which is most of the way to a sale at this price.

Castle helped Arabella Designs grow beyond sofas. Beds joined the range from autumn 2025, and the store now lists 14 of them. Lighting followed in the summer of 2026, and there are now more than 50 lamps, pendants and chandeliers.

A wider range does two things for a business like this. It gives the advertising more to say to people who aren’t in the market for a sofa this month. And it raises what a showroom visit can be worth, because someone who comes in for a corner sofa can leave with the lighting and a bed as well.

Growth came in steps, not one jump. Monthly revenue went from around £30,000 to £50,000, then to £80,000, and has since passed £130,000 in several months.

Over 15 months that took Arabella Designs from a business producing £300,000 a year to one generating more than £1.1 million in sales. Website traffic grew 152% over the last 12 months, so more people are arriving, and the rebuilt site is turning more of them into sample orders, showroom visits and sales.

UK consumers spent £20.15 billion on furniture in 2025, up 3.2% on the year before, according to the FIRA Statistics Digest. More of every retail pound is spent online too: the Office for National Statistics found that 28.8% of all retail sales in Great Britain were made online in August 2026.

For a bespoke brand that’s an opportunity and a test. The research starts on a screen, but a sofa still gets bought with the hands. The brands that win online in this category are the ones that make the physical step, the sample or the showroom, part of the online journey.

• Treat the sample as a conversion. For a high-ticket sofa, a sample order or a showroom booking is the first sale. Build the site and the campaigns to win it.
• Make trust visible everywhere. Guarantees, free delivery and reviews belong on every page, not just the checkout.
• Grow the range with the audience. Beds and lighting gave the same customers more to buy and the ads more to say.
• Rebuild before you scale. Spending more on traffic only pays once the site converts it.

How did Arabella Designs grow from £300k to £1.1m?

Castle rebuilt the Shopify store around free fabric samples and showroom visits, ran Google Ads and Meta Ads to feed it, and helped add beds and lighting to the range. Within 15 months the business was generating more than £1.1 million in sales.

Why do free samples matter for luxury sofas?

Few people spend £2,000 or more on a sofa without feeling the fabric. A free sample puts the product in their home, and for Arabella Designs sample orders have grown by 30% month on month.

Which advertising channels were used?

Google Ads for people searching for luxury, corner and bespoke sofas, and Meta Ads on Facebook and Instagram using room-set imagery, Trustpilot reviews and showroom invitations.

How much did website traffic grow?

Website traffic grew 152% over the last 12 months, while the rebuilt site turned more of those visitors into sample orders, showroom visits and sales.