COAT PAINTS

Founded in 2020 by Rob Green and Rob Abrahams, after both had separately gone through the time-consuming, wasteful experience of redecorating a house in their 30s and decided the paint-buying process itself needed rebuilding. They started out from a small rented unit in Surrey, doing everything themselves — building the brand and website, hand-painting tester swatches, mixing paint by hand — before establishing production in Clerkenwell, London. COAT paints are made to order rather than to stock, and the company runs a 360-degree recycling loop: customers can send back empty tins, handles and excess paint, which COAT reprocesses into new recycled paint products, tackling the roughly two million litres of excess paint sent to UK landfill every year (with another 55 million litres left unused under stairs and in sheds). COAT became the first B Corp certified paint company in the UK and describes itself as carbon negative.