Greenlit Brands’ Freedom Furniture sold to Quadrant’s ultra-cheap Amart

Private equity-backed Amart will buy Freedom Furniture from Greenlit Brands to create a $1bn home furnishings retailer.

Together the group will have 120 stores in Australia and New Zealand and estimated combined annual turnover of $1 billion, the companies said on Monday.

The new owner of Freedom Furniture, private equity-backed Amart, has promised to keep the 40-year-old brand alive when it is integrated with its new discount stablemate known for cheap and cheerful dining tables and sofas.

Quadrant private equity-backed Amart will buy Freedom Furniture from Greenlit Brands to create a $1 billion home furnishings retailer. No purchase price was disclosed.

The South African-owned Greenlit Brands, which also owns Fantastic Furniture, has been entertaining selling its trendier offering for months, according to The Australian’s DataRoom column.

Together the group will have 120 stores in Australia and New Zealand and estimated combined annual turnover of $1 billion, the companies said on Monday. Australia’s biggest furniture retailer, Harvey Norman, turns over more than $6bn annually across its local franchised stores.

Freedom Furniture’s offering targeting design loving homeowners.

“Freedom has been a vital and rewarding part of the Greenlit Brands group and we are confident that the business will prosper even further as part of a combined Amart group,” said Greenlit Brands chair Michael Ford in a statement.

“Over the past six years, the Freedom business has been transformed into the vibrant omni channel retailer it is today.”

That leaves Greenlit, a manufacturer and retailer, with only Fantastic Furniture, which it described as financially and operationally independent.

“Greenlit Brands remains committed to realising value for its shareholders and will continue to carefully and methodically evaluate divestment opportunities,” Mr Ford said, implying that too was up for sale for the right price.

He has already traded Snooze to the private retail conglomerate owned by billionaire Larry Kestelman and Plush to rival Nick Scali Furniture. Fantastic Furniture was also rumoured as a possible sharemarket float since it was separated into its own holding company in 2022.

Selling Freedom Furniture concludes a long and drawn out process that began with the problems of South Africa’s Steinhoff International, of which Greenlit Brands is the Australian subsidiary.

Greenlit Brands chief executive Michael Ford.

Mr Ford, a veteran retailer and CEO of The Good Guys for 13 years before it was sold to JB Hi-Fi, was appointed by Steinhoff to run its Australian operations in 2017 – only months before a financial scandal erupted at Steinhoff.

The company had overstated its profits in an accounting scandal that toppled its former CEO Markus Jooste, who was in 2024 fined 475m rand by South Africa’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority for signing off on false and misleading financial statements alongside European boss Dirk Schreiber.

In South Africa it is better known as the owner of Pepkor.

Mr Ford once described the feeling of surviving the Steinhoff mess only to land into Covid-19 as “like walking into an ambush and being hit by two claymores”.

He also sold department stores Harris Scarfe, Best & Less and closed a poorly timed launch of British department store Debenhams.

Steinhoff has been the beneficiary of chunky dividends from the Greenlit Brands buying the local business time to get to its debt-free position and stage a careful sales process.

Freedom Furniture and its former sister brands nearly went the way of Godfreys and Rivers in the Australian retail graveyard. At the height of the Steinhoff crisis, the company appointed receivers Ferrier Hodgson and law firm Minter Ellison to advise its Asia Pacific arm, which included its Australian brands.

“The divestment of Freedom to Amart marks a milestone in this strategic journey,” Greenlit Brands said in its statement. The transaction will have to clear the usual conditions to reach settlement.

Amart has 66 stores, and has itself been a subject of on-again, off-again sale speculation. It was founded by Queensland billionaire John van Lieshout, worth $2.9bn according to the Richest 250, who sold the business to Ironbridge in 2006 for $500m and kept its properties.

Originally published as Greenlit Brands’ Freedom Furniture sold to Quadrant’s ultra-cheap Amart