About Us

It started the way most small South African businesses do. A family, a rented floor, a few machines and long days. Not recliners — plain static lounge suites, the sort that end up in an ordinary front room. We built them for chain stores and for the independent shops down the road, and our name was on none of them.

Frames that came back. Foam that gave up early. Nobody teaches you this in a classroom — you find it out when a suite returns to your floor and you have to work out why. We changed timber, changed suppliers, changed the way a seat is put together, and the problems got rarer.

The orders got bigger and stranger. A chain wanting four hundred of something in a colour nobody had asked for before. An independent shop down the coast wanting six, in a fabric we had to go and find. Every one of them taught us something about what different buyers actually want, and about how to build the same thing well four hundred times over rather than once.

After thirty-five years of building furniture that left our floor under other people’s names, we put ours on it — and moved into recliners properly for the first time. Glyde-X, starting with the Cordoba: recliner lounge suites in air leather and top grain genuine leather, sold straight from the factory to South African homes, without the retail markup that used to sit in between.

More designs, more configurations, more of the range. The same factory, the same family, and the same people answering the phone when you call.

Solid pine and plywood with reinforced joinery, and every seat on the Cordoba rated to 130kg.

Imported steel mechanisms, fitted in our factory. The Cordoba is hand-operated — smooth, quiet, and nothing to plug in.

High-density foam over pocket springs, with zig-zag springs beneath. Layered densities that resist sagging over time.