Loungers

The innovative chain of neighbourhood all-day café bars that provide customers with a ‘third space’ between work and home, to meet, chat, eat and drink.

Invested in 2012, exited 2017

Started in 2002 by a trio of longstanding friends. Alex Reilley, Jake Bishop and Dave Reid saw an opportunity to create a new chain of informal, neighbourhood all-day café-bars. They opened their first site in Bristol, a city that now supports a total of six Lounges.

A second chain, Cosy Club, was developed to offer customers a similar relaxed but slightly more glamorous dining and drinking solution in city centres.

In April 2012, Piper invested £16m when the business comprised 20 Lounges and three Cosy Club sites across the UK.

Piper’s investment and support enabled the business to rapidly scale the Loungers and Cosy Club businesses, taking advantage of unit vacancies and rental deals. Piper also guided demographic analysis of sites to underpin the roll out programme; conducting customer research to further develop and define the Cosy Club proposition; growing the team; and creating a world class development programme for managers using a third party introduced by Piper.

In 2017 we sold our stake to Lion Capital in a transaction valuing the business at £137m. Over our investment, the company quadrupled the number of sites to 94, opening 20 sites a year from 2014 and creating employment for almost 2,000 people.