It’s been a whirlwind week for Designers Guild. The company entered administration—the U.K.’s version of bankruptcy protection for corporate entities—after rumblings about its struggles emerged earlier this week. Now, it seems all is not lost: Sanderson Design Group announced today that it has signed a 10-year licensing agreement to produce Designers Guild’s wallpapers, fabrics and paint.

The agreement grants Sanderson Design Group—a family of fabric and wallcovering brands that includes Sanderson, Morris & Co. and Zoffany, among others—sole global rights to design, manufacture and sell products under the Designers Guild brand. The licensing deal is with the U.K. retailer Dunelm, which had purchased the Designers Guild brand and its archive in April 2025, then leased them back in an arrangement that allowed the home goods brand and its stores to continue operating independently.

“Designers Guild is an absolutely iconic brand,” says Sanderson CEO Lisa Montague. “I think that [founder] Tricia Guild is a creative visionary, who was way ahead of her time in taking a lifestyle approach to interior design that was all-encompassing. You really lived the lifestyle of Designers Guild. It’s something that we feel that we can capture and reimagine. We’re going to give it a new platform from the strong foundation that we have, being a bigger group with vertical integration, manufacturing and global distribution networks. It’s a great opportunity for us to bring it into our family and to give it a future.”

In a release announcing the deal, Sanderson said it will “immediately replenish existing best-sellers to fulfil demand, and an initial stock package will be available shortly on the trade site.” Under the new agreement, Designers Guild products will be manufactured through Sanderson Design Group’s U.K.-based production network and distributed through its existing channels. Up until its administration filing, Designers Guild produced and distributed fabric and wallcovering for brands like Christian Lacroix Maison, Ralph Lauren Home and John Derian—collaborations that Montague says were not part of the current agreement. “We’re very open to having conversations with those brands, but we have not had them yet,” she adds.

Founded in 1970, Designers Guild began when married couple Tricia and Robin Guild acquired an importer of Indian block-printed textiles. Over the following decades, Tricia grew the company into a beloved British brand, expanding to include a retail operation, fabrics, wallpapers, furniture, decor and more.

Designers Guild began to visibly struggle in recent months, shuttering its flagship showroom in London and preparing documents for entering into administration while looking for a white-knight investor to salvage the company. Yesterday it halted operations and laid off its employees.

Looking ahead, Montague says the priority is getting Designers Guild product back in stock as soon as possible, and she hopes to maintain the brand’s U.S. distribution partner, Osborne & Little. “We’re looking for the least disruption possible so that the people who are fans of the brand—who are used to going to the places they go to, to work with it—that they can find it,” she says. Along those same lines, her team is working to get Designers Guild on Sanderson’s trade portal, and to get a consumer-facing website up and running as well. “We find it very exciting to give this brand a home and continue to celebrate,” she adds. “It would have been awful to see it disappear.”