Pull up a chair – lessons from a UK furniture brand’s first foray into semiotics

Jo Bowman

The marketing and management teams at furniture maker/retailer HSL have gone from never having heard of semiotics to being complete converts in the space of one project.

Furniture retailer HSL, a business based in the north of England with 53 years’ experience targeting “older” consumers, makes and sells high-quality beds, chairs and sofas that are neither mass market nor focused on the “mobility” market.

HSL aspires to provide furniture that has the ability to improve users’ comfort and wellbeing, but it was only when it began a semiotic study into the sector and its own offering that the brand realised how wide of its goal it often was.

At the MRS Semiotics & Cultural Insight conference (February 2022), Venessa Hodgson, Group Marketing Director at HSL, readily admitted...

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