Deal by 15-year-old online upstart shows how Covid crisis has further shifted sales away from high street The symbolism is stark: a venerable 243-year-old department store chain acquired by a 15-year-old online upstart. Debenhams will disappear from British high streets after its sale to Boohoo, swallowed by a company that thrives in the world of fast fashion and has become mired in controversy in the process. Boohoo has drawn criticism for poor working conditions in its supply chain but continues to make strong sales growth as it feeds a voracious consumer appetite for affordable fashion that responds quickly to shifts in taste and style. The Topman Topshop store in BrightonThe Topman Topshop store in Brighton. Asos has bought the Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge brands from failed retail group Arcadia in a deal said to be worth £295m. ASOS buys Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge brands, UK - 01 Feb 2021 Asos in talks to buy Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge Read more The £55m deal also marks a changing of the guard in UK retail prompted by a radical acceleration towards buying clothes, beauty products and homewares online during the pandemic. First launched in 2006, Manchester-based Boohoo has grown from a three-employee operation to a business with sales of more than £1.2bn last year and a 5,000-strong workforce. Sales jumped 40% in the run-up to Christmas as shoppers shrugged off revelations about treatment of workers in factories making Boohoo’s clothing in the UK and overseas. An investigation by the Guardian found that factories in Leicester making the company’s clothes were failing to pay workers the minimum wage and were putting the health of staff at risk during lockdown. Sir Brian Leveson, who led the phone-hacking inquiry, was drafted in to lead change at Boohoo after a damning independent review, which found that media reports of poor conditions in the company’s supply chain were “substantially true”. The Boohoo co-founder Mahmud Kamani said this month that he was proud of the speed at which his team had reacted to the supply chain scandal. But Leveson said a clean-up of the retailer’s supply chain had a “long way to go”. The issues at factories are not the only reason Boohoo has drawn criticism. Shortly after unveiling the record profits last year, Boohoo announced a controversial scheme under which its bosses could receive a £150m bonus if the company’s shares rose by two-thirds over three years. Its co-founders Carol Kane and Kamani would receive two-thirds of the payout. In May last year, Boohoo raised £200m to buy up brands and has already taken advantage of rivals’ difficulties to snap up Oasis, Warehouse, Karen Millen and Coast. It also consolidated its stake in Pretty Little Thing, giving Mahmud’s son Umar Kamani and his business partner, Paul Papworth, more than £260m for their 35% stake. The Debenhams deal is the latest in this consolidation campaign. The long-troubled department store chain has been on the radar of would-be buyers for some time. It began looking for a rescue bidder last summer after calling in administrators twice in a year. Founded in 1778, Debenhams is one of the world’s oldest department stores but has been brought down after being loaded with debt by a force in modern finance: private equity. First listed on the London Stock Exchange in the 1920s, at one time the group had more than 200 large stores across 18 countries and partnerships with some of the world’s best-known designers, including Jasper Conran and Julien Macdonald. But in recent years sales have stagnated as it struggled to cope with heavy debts built up under private equity ownership. In 2003 the group was taken over by a private equity consortium. The trio of funds, TPG, CVC Capital and Merrill Lynch, collected £1.2bn in dividends in less than three years. In 2005, 23 shops were sold for £495m, as part of an effort to pay down debts linked to the buyout. Debenhams leased the stores back, on expensive rent deals up to 35 years in length. As it struggled with those long leases and heavy debts, Debenhams lacked resources to improve the appeal of its ageing stores and was slow to shift towards selling online. While some of its in-house brands remain quite large, growth has stalled as they have not been updated sufficiently and some rely on designer names that were considered old hat a decade ago. Despite that, Debenhams’ online business takes £400m a year from 300 million visitors, making it one of the top retail websites in the UK. Analysts say the acquisition of Debenhams’ website will take Boohoo to a new level, helping it appeal to older shoppers and giving access to new markets including beauty, homewares and sportswear. Boohoo hopes to use its existing systems to take Debenhams brands such as Principles, Maine and Mantaray overseas, and improve their distribution in the UK. The company also wants to set itself up as a marketplace – similar to Amazon or Zalando – selling third-party brands for the first time using Debenhams’ existing relationships. Andrew Wade, an analyst at the stockbroker firm Jefferies, said Boohoo had “bought a lot of asset for £55m” if Debenhams’ relationships with brands were added to its expertise in beauty, homewares and sportswear. But the permanent closure of Debenhams’ remaining 124 stores will leave enormous gaps on high streets around the country and the loss of thousands of steady jobs, the majority of which were held by women. Meanwhile, Boohoo has plenty of money to pull off similar deals and says it has £387m of cash left to fund further acquisitions. The impact of coronavirus on the high street will produce many more targets.

أعلنت مجموعة الشايع، الشركة الرائدة في إدارة وتشغيل العلامات التجارية العالمية، بالتعاون مع شركة والت ديزني الشرق الأوسط، عن خطة لمدة خمس سنوات، سيتم تنفيذها في أسواق متعدّدة، وستشهد افتتاح أول متجر ديزني بمفهوم «متجر داخل متجر» في منطقة الشرق الأوسط وشمال أفريقيا. تمنح الاتفاقية الجديدة مجموعة الشايع حقوقاً حصرية في منطقة الشرق الأوسط لافتتاح مواقع لمتجر ديزني بمفهوم «متجر داخل متجر»، وستتضمن تشكيلة مختارة من منتجات متجر ديزني، بما في ذلك أزياء الشخصيات والملابس والألعاب والهدايا التذكارية والسلع المنزلية من شخصيات ديزني وأفلامها الشهيرة. ستتوفّر المنتجات في منتصف العام القادم في محال دبنهامز ومذركير التي تديرها مجموعة الشايع وأونلاين من خلال مواقع التجارة الإلكترونية الخاصة بهذه المحلات. في هذا السياق، قال الرئيس التنفيذي لمجموعة الشايع، جون هادن: «يسعدنا الترحيب بشركة ديزني، إحدى أشهر العلامات التجارية في العالم، كعلامة تجارية شريكة لمجموعة الشايع. نتطلّع إلى إقامة علاقة قوية ووثيقة مع الشركة بينما نقدّم تجربة ديزني المحبوبة لزبائننا». من جانبه، قال دان دوسا، نائب الرئيس والمدير العام لقطاع منتجات المستهلكين في جنوب شرق آسيا والهند والشرق الأوسط وشمال أفريقيا بشركة ديزني: «لا شك في أن مواقع متجر ديزني بمفهوم (متجر داخل متجر) بقيادة مجموعة الشايع تضع الشرق الأوسط على الخريطة العالمية لمتجر ديزني، ونحن حريصون على نجاح تنفيذ هذا المفهوم». واختتم دوسا حديثه بالتأكيد على أن ديزني «تتطلّع دائماً إلى اكتشاف طرق جديدة لاستمتاع جماهيرها ومستهلكي منتجاتها بحكاياتهم وشخصياتهم المفضّلة، وسيُتاح لها من خلال اتفاقية التعاون الجديدة تقديم تجربة مذهلة في المتاجر للأطفال والعائلات على مستوى الشرق الأوسط، مما سيسمح بنقلهم إلى عالم ديزني المبهر». ملابس من شخصيات ديزني وأفلامها Volume 0% ألعاب وهدايا تذكارية

LONDON The British department store Debenhams can trace its history back 242 years to a shop on Wigmore Street in central London. On Tuesday, it finally succumbed to the pressures of 21st-century e-commerce. After more than a year of restructuring and several months of trying to find a buyer, the company said it would begin shutting down. Debenhams is the second big retailer to topple in two days, after Arcadia Group, which owns brands including Topshop and Miss Selfridge, filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday. The two are also linked because Arcadia’s brands have a big footprint in Debenhams, with sections set aside for their clothes. And so, as Christmas lights flicker above the sidewalks in Britain’s downtowns and as the busiest shopping period of the year begins after a monthlong lockdown in England, the nation is watching two of its largest retailers fall. They have about 25,000 employees between them. More bankruptcies are expected, as the lockdowns have relentlessly exposed the retailers that have failed to pick up on customers’ willingness to shop online. “The retail house of cards on the high street is in danger of collapse,” said Susannah Streeter, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. Britain’s fashion retailers enjoyed a golden period and were seen for a time as a source of national pride. The Debenhams evening wear department was a middle-class destination for all of life’s major celebrations. Marks & Spencer, which announced plans during the summer to lay off nearly 8,000 workers, was a byword for quality for decades, with its cotton underwear and cashmere knits a staple of British households. In the 2000s, Topshop — once considered the jewel in the crown of Philip Green’s Arcadia Group — was a genuine style authority thanks to sellout collaborations with the model Kate Moss and a vast Oxford Street emporium laden with catwalk-inspired knockoffs. But these brands have suffered for years. Fast-fashion giants from overseas, like Zara from Spain and H&M from Sweden, started selling cheaper, trendier clothes. They were followed by online-only upstarts such as Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing (similar to the American brand Fashion Nova). Geared toward young women and powered by social commerce, they offer low-priced fashion products designed to be browsed, bought and worn on social media. The pandemic has hastened the demise of brands found in Britain’s high street shopping districts. For about a third of the year, clothing stores and other nonessential retailers have been shuttered to comply with lockdowns, accelerating the move to e-commerce. Since February, online clothing sales have grown 17 percent in Britain, while in-store sales have slumped 22 percent. The old guard retailers and department stores that were too slow to invest in their online operations have found themselves grappling with the costs of real estate empires visited by fewer and fewer people. Even accounting for scores of closures in recent years, Debenhams has 124 department stores, while Arcadia has 444 stores for its brands in Britain. “Like Arcadia Group, Debenhams might have stood a better chance had its footprint of retail stores been smaller, but they were stuck with too many shops, on long leases they could not wriggle out of,” Ms. Streeter said. Many fast-fashion retailers continue to thrive throughout the pandemic because they have few or no brick-and-mortar stores. Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing generally source from British-based manufacturers in cities like Leicester. Clothes can be produced quickly and distributed faster within the country. “If you are a high street shop, you have to sell a considerable amount in order to just break even,” because of high business property taxes and rents, said Stewart Perry, a partner in the insolvency and restructuring practice at Fieldfisher, a European law firm. “They are competing with a warehouse in the back-end of nowhere.” This summer, Boohoo came under intense public scrutiny after reports that its suppliers in Leicester were paying workers as little as 3.50 pounds, or $4.40, an hour. (The national living wage in Britain for ages 25 and above is £8.72, or $10.93.) But investors had already placed their bets on Boohoo. Its share price is up 7 percent this year, while the benchmark stock index in Britain has dropped 15 percent. In the past five years, Boohoo’s share price has risen more than 800 percent. In a sign of its growing influence, Boohoo bought the rights to the onetime British fashion retailing stalwarts Karen Millen, Coast, Oasis and Warehouse after they collapsed. By this same method, parts of Debenhams and Arcadia could still be rescued. There is speculation that Boohoo might bid for some of Arcadia’s brand portfolio, particularly Topshop. In January, the consultancy Brand Finance estimated the value of Arcadia’s brands at £800 million, the bulk of which was attributed to Topshop. This week’s announcements are the latest in a slow-moving decline for both companies. Last year, Arcadia entered into a so-called company voluntary agreement in Britain, where it closed stores and renegotiated debt terms, and filed for bankruptcy in the United States. In April 2019, Debenhams went into administration, wiping out some shareholders, and did it again this April. The fact that neither company has been able to survive any longer even as the government is pouring tens of billions of pounds into shoring up businesses suggests that this trend for many retail stores is irreversible. Britain’s Treasury has ushered in a series of programs, breaks in the payment of business taxes, deferrals on sales taxes, protections from evictions, wage subsidies and grants. By one gauge, the measures have worked: Company insolvencies were 42 percent lower in October than they were a year earlier. By another, they have failed: Britain’s economy is expected to decline more than 11 percent this year, worse than almost every other advanced economy, while it has spent more than most others on its fiscal response. There are likely to be more casualties before Britain climbs out of the economic hole. “Corporate insolvencies have nearly halved at a time when obviously the economy is tanking,” Mr. Perry said. “There are an awful lot of insolvencies being stored up.”

Celine UK Newco 1 Limited, the owner of department store group Debenhams, has appointed administrators to prepare for its own potential bankruptcy filing. In a notice last week, Celine Group Holdings said it had appointed Philip James Watkins and Philip Lewis Armstrong of FRP Advisory Trading Limited as administrators in respect of the company and its immediate parent company, Celine UK Newco 1 Limited. “The appointment of administrators is a consequence of the entry into administration of the primary operating company of the Debenhams’ group on 9 April 2020,” it said in a statement. The move is not expected to impact Debenhams’ trading. The retailer has been in administration since April after the Covid-19 pandemic weighed further on its finances. Earlier this month, the group announced plans to cut 2,500 jobs across its store network and distribution centre as part of its latest cost-cutting drive. To date, it has reportedly cut around 6,500 jobs and closed 20 stores. The retail group, which originally had 142 UK stores and employed around 22,000 staff, said its administrators had initiated a process to assess ways for the business to exit its protective administration. This, it said, could include the current owners retaining the business, potential new joint venture arrangements, or a sale to a third party. Investment bank Lazard is understood to be running a sale process for Debenhams, according to The Sunday Times, but sources say it is unlikely to yield offers to run the retail group as a going concern. Its biggest lender, Silver Point, could either buy the chain out of administration in a restructured form, or liquidate it, should no bids materialise, the publication says.