Arcadia Group has announced plans to close all of its Topshop stores in the United States as part of its filing for bankruptcy protection. The move comes just 10 years after Topshop’s glitzy, celebrity-filled launch in New York. It currently has just 11 stores across the country in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Diego, Chicago, Houston and Miami. The company is also planning to close 23 stores in the United Kingdom.
The proposed plan is part of a new restructuring deal put forward by Arcadia. Arcadia CEO Ian Grabiner called the restructure a “tough but necessary decision for the business” in a press statement. As part of the deal, the company is seeking approval from the Pension Protection Fund regarding plans to halve payments to its pension fund and approval from its landlords for price cuts on rent. Arcadia says that without the deal, 19,000 jobs would be at risk.
In recent years, the company has seen its sales and profits drop as competition has increased in the fast-fashion market. Arcadia’s most recent earnings showed that its revenue declined 5.6 percent to £1.9 billion ($2.4 billion) in the 12 months to August 26, 2017. In its U.S. court filing for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection, which grants a foreign company protection from creditors, the company listed its assets as $53 million and total debt as $179 million.
Grabiner said in his statement, “Against a backdrop of challenging retail headwinds, changing consumer habits and ever-increasing online competition, we have seriously considered all possible strategic options to return the Group to a stable financial platform.” In addition to the 11 stores in the U.S., the group operates 566 Topshop, Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Outfit, and other stores in the UK and Ireland. An exact date for the store closures have not yet been announced, but liquidation sales could go into effect as early as this weekend.
