The founder of an East Anglian-based furniture brand who sells reclaimed cinema seats to customers all around the world says she started her business 'completely on a whim'.
Kerry Rutter loved vintage even before it was cool.
“My whole ethos in life, what I love, is taking something old and making it beautiful again,” she says. “That’s my passion and has been for years, before it became trendy.”
Her love of turning something old into something beautiful has taken her down a relatively niche path, from classic cars – her former business – to vintage cinema seats.
In 2017, she founded Unseen Icons, an East Anglian-based upholstery and design firm which has become well-loved for its bold, maximalist design.
Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t planned.
Kerry says she decided “completely on a whim” to retrain as an upholsterer. “I literally thought of it and on the same day, booked myself in on the course,” she says.
After she finished, she took on some upholstery jobs but says she found the work lonely.
In her spare time, Kerry was still going to vintage fairs. At one of them, and on another “total whim”, she bought some vintage cinema seats. She posted a picture on her Instagram and asked if anyone wanted to buy them if she did them up. As it happens, they did.
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At another vintage event – which she almost didn’t go to – Kerry saw another set. “I wasn’t looking for anything particular,” she says, “but I saw some more cinema seats and thought they were pretty cool.
“They were bright red, the metalwork all painted and everything. The bloke, I think, gave me quite a good price because it was the end of the day, so I bought them and lugged them back to the car – I still remember this, they were so heavy.”
She posted a picture on Instagram and asked if anyone would be interested and again, someone was.
She re-upholstered them in pink velvet and painted both the wood and metalwork gold, on the customer’s request. “That’s really where it started,” she says. “That was my money shot for years. Every time I put it up [online], I’d get more orders.”
Kerry had, in many ways, found her niche. She started buying cinema seats whenever she saw them. “I’d buy them online if I saw a set at a good price, but over the years, it’s evolved – now the cinemas contact me.”
Nowadays, she says she buys them in bulk, anything from 100 to 300 seats at a time, and says that since starting out, the whole process has changed. “My team has grown and we’ve got better at what we do,” she says. “Although we’re upholsterers, I would say 90pc of our work is cinema seats.”
Customers commission Unseen Icons from all over the country, and the world, but Kerry says the seats are rarely bought to go in cinema rooms.
“They tend to go in hallways,” Kerry explains. “That’s a really big one because they’re really shallow when the seat flips.
“Hallways are great because [when] people open their front door, that’s the first thing they see. I think they use them to sort of perch on, putting shoes on and off, but I think primarily they’re a piece of furniture that just looks beautiful. People will treat them a bit like a work of art.”
Other customers, she says, have used them around their dining room table, and some even as their main seating in a living room.
“I think more and more people want to get vintage into their house who maybe wouldn’t have, even five years ago,” Kerry says. “That wouldn’t have been their world – I think it’s become a lot more mainstream now.
“People can actually see the aesthetic, that you can have a beautiful vintage piece in your house, but your house can still be modern if you want it to be.
“I think five to 10 years ago, people were like ‘oh, if you like vintage, your whole house has to be a bit like a museum’. They didn’t really get it, but I think now people can see that one beautiful vintage piece, particularly when it’s refurbished, can be a real statement piece.”
Kerry says that even though she and her team have completed hundreds of sets of cinema seats, no two are exactly the same. “Everything’s very personalised and I think that’s the beauty of it,” she says, and it’s something Unseen Icons carries through into the rest of the service, too.
“Some people can’t visualise things very well,” Kerry says, “so you get a design consultation.” This can be done in-house, at the Unseen Icons studio in Writtle, Essex, or online.
“Most of my customers aren’t local so we do everything on Zoom, where we talk through all the different personalisations and the process of how we do it. We very much get a feel for how they want their home to look and feel.”
This might include customers showing Kerry around their house over Zoom, she says, or picking out colours from a statement piece of art that they already own, which can be complemented by one of the thousands of fabric options available. “It’s very much a guided process, I would say – almost bordering on interior design.”
After that, the team will send out a selection of physical samples, so that the customer can try them in their own home and see how they look in different lights. Once they have chosen, it’s on to the customer journey.
“They get sent a little metal cinema seat in the post, saying that their seats are in progress and then they get updates throughout the process,” Kerry explains.
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“They get the history of where their seats came from [and] a bit of provenance with them. I actually send out a PDF that says they came out of this cinema, it opened on this day, it had this and this and this and then it shut on this day, because most of the cinemas have been through several lives before they end up back wherever they’ve ended up.
“I’ve got a batch at the moment that I’m working on, and it’s actually just been bought as an Everyman. It had been shut for donkey’s years, prior to that, and then prior to that it was a bingo hall and prior to that it was the actual cinema, so they get all of that with it.
“Then they get updates and pictures all the way up until the seats are actually finished.”
This level of care and personalisation has so far served the business well, Kerry says, and because it’s so personal, she finds that a lot of customers who have bought cinema seats return to her for ‘normal’ upholstery work. “They trust you then, and they trust the quality of the work and they like you,” she says.
“That’s the main thing. I like people, that’s the bit I love. I love the creativity and I love dealing with my customers and being able to produce something that you’re actually going to really love.
“The idea is you’re going to treasure this for years to come, rather than it just being ‘I bought myself a nice chair and it’s just going to sit there and when that’s worn out, it will be gone.’ We’re quite sustainable.”
Most of the brand’s cinema seats are bespoke commissions – making up around 85pc of their workload, Kerry says – but they also stock a few ‘ready to go’ items, too, with prices starting at £1,035 for a single seat.
At the moment, Kerry says the brand is about to branch out, getting ready to launch a new interior design service and sell bespoke lampshades, as well as continue its more mainstream upholstery services for things like sofas and armchairs. She’d also love to take up residence in more shops too, her seats having just appeared in the window of Lauren Rose Interior Design in Norwich.
Ultimately, though, Unseen Icons is about being bold and being different, making the world of interior design and upholstery much less intimidating and, Kerry says, sharing the joy in what the team does.
The brand has almost 22,500 followers on Instagram and posts regular updates about commissions and sneak peeks behind-the-scenes. It’s also become one of the easiest places for customers to get in touch.
“I’m really easy to reach out to,” Kerry says. “[People] can come by the website, of course, but they can also just send me a DM on Instagram – that’s where actually most people come from. That’s where they’re finding me because they feel they already sort of know me.”
To find out more, visit unseenicons.com or follow @unseenicons on Instagram.
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