'We want to achieve an inspirational place' - Banbury man goes from Saturday boy to CEO of national chain

Matt Williams stepped in last year to save the Tile Giant, after the national chain went into administration.

And one year on, the new CEO has managed to turn the business around.

Matt Williams has spent most of his life around tiles – his father Stuart founded the London-based Tile Kingdom in 1983 after taking inspiration from the Brazilian use of tiles while working abroad in the coffee industry.

Tile Kingdom grew as a business until it bought out and took over Topps Tiles in 1994, listing it on The London Stock Exchange in 1997 with 54 stores.

Matt said: “In 1999, I came into the business to acquire and lease new stores, although I had previously worked in stores as a Saturday boy from the age of 16.

"We had a very good time at Topps and greatly enjoyed it, but in late 2019, I decided I wanted to do something else, so I left Topps.”

After leaving Topps Tiles, Matt went on to run The Original Factory Shop for a year before being drawn back to the tile industry to start his own tile retailer business.

He said: “Like all these things, the tile industry seems to have a gravitational force that pulls you back into it. I looked at buying a few businesses but then decided that I would start my own, which we have called Stiled."

In February 2023, Matt took over tile shop Tile Giant and now combines both businesses by using Stiled as one of Tile Giant’s primary suppliers.

Although brought up around London, Matthew and his family moved to the Banbury area in 2005 while working for Topps and have made the area a base and the town’s branch of Tile Giant the flagship store.

The family does have a connection to the town, with Matt’s father having previously worked importing coffee to the Jacobs Douwe Egberts factory and his mother-in-law studying at Tudor Hall School.

Since taking over the business, the Banbury store, run by manager Clare Liddell, has been involved in a number of community projects, most notably donating damaged and used tiles to Middleton Cheney Primary Academy for the pupils to complete a mosaic project.

Clare says that building up relations in the community is an important part of her job. She said: “We might have two or three metres that can be used as splashback, and what we want to do is reach out to local charities that we can work with.

"They are getting something for free, and we are reducing waste and becoming more sustainable, so everyone is benefiting. If people have ideas, they can come into the shop and talk to us about them. We are very open to ideas.”

She added: "We have customers that just swing by for a coffee and tell us that it's like going back to the 50s or 60s in terms of customer service here, and that’s what we want to create.”

Last week (Tuesday January 23) Tile Giant purchased 10 Tile Choice stores located around the West Midlands, expanding Matt’s growing tile empire to more than 60 stores nationwide and over 300 employees.