Richard Shops

Last updated

Richard Shops
Company type Private
Industry Retail
Founded1936
Defunct1999
FateDormant company
Successor Arcadia Group
Headquarters London, UK
Key people
John Sofio,
Charles Clore,
Joseph Collier

Richard Shops was a British high street retailer of women's fashion.

Contents

History

The business was created in 1936 by John Sofio, who modelled the business on the US company Lerner Brothers. [1] The company was bankrupt by 1941 and was purchased by Charles Clore for £45,000, [1] who subsequently expanded the business before selling it on for £800,000 [1] in 1949 [2] to United Drapery Stores. [3] [4]

Richards was managed by Rudy Weil until his retirement in the mid-1970s. [3] From the 1960s to the 1990s, an expansion of the number of stores [5] saw it as a ubiquitous part of almost every British high street and shopping centre, selling fashion clothing designed to appeal to young women. In the 1970s a hugely popular television advertisement began to appear with a memorable jingle, also used for radio advertisements on Capital Radio. [6]

In 1983 UDS was sold to Hanson plc. Hanson started selling off parts of UDS to pay for its purchase. Fellow UDS bedfellow John Collier was purchased in a management buyout, but Richard Shops' management were unable to raise the capital and it was bought by the newly formed retail group Habitat/Mothercare plc, and became part of Storehouse plc after the merger of Habitat/Mothercare with British Home Stores in 1986. [7]

With the financial troubles suffered by the Storehouse group in the late 1980s, Richard Shops began to lose direction at a time when the high street was becoming a more competitive place for fashion retailers. Since 1972 the men's clothing retailer Burton had been expanding its chain of women's fashion stores under the TopShop brand, and in 1979 it acquired Richard Shops' long-time rival Dorothy Perkins. A more direct assault on Richard Shops came in 1984 from the Burton Group, as Burton was now called, when it launched the unisex fashion chain Principles. Not only did Principles manage to capture something of the mood of the late 1980s in its designs, but it represented the most direct assault to date by Burton on the largely middle-class customer base of Richard Shops. In 1985, Richard Shops had to cancel a contract with South African suppliers over campaigns against apartheid. [8]

In 1988 Storehouse appointed a new chief executive, Michael Julien, with Sir Terence Conran becoming chairman, and the group was reorganised into three divisions, with Richard Shops sharing 'Speciality Retailing' with the group's brands Mothercare, Blazer, Anonymous, and Jacadi.

In 1992 Richard Shops was sold to Clore's former company, the British retailing giant Sears plc [9] (not to be confused with the American stores of the same name), the then owner of the London department store Selfridges, and the women's clothing retailers Wallis, Miss Selfridge and Outfit. In 1999 Sir Philip Green, who had acquired Sears plc, transferred Richard Shops, along with Wallis, to the Arcadia Group [10] which immediately announced the closure of all branches of Richard Shops, or their conversion to other Arcadia brands.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Lovelock, Derek (1990). Gorb, Peter (ed.). Design Management: Papers from the London Business School. p. 151-156. ISBN   9780442303631.
  2. ↑ Palmer, Mark (2013). Clarks: Made to Last: The story of Britain's best-known shoe firm. ISBN   978-1847658456.
  3. 1 2 Timpson, John (2015). High Street Heroes: The Story of British Retail in 50 People. ISBN   9781848319172.
  4. ↑ Dean F. Berry, Sebastian Green (2016). Cultural, Structural and Strategic Change in Management Buyouts. p. 150. ISBN   9781349215591.
  5. ↑ "United Drapery Stores". Investors Chronicle and Stock Exchange Gazette. 24: 1592. 1973.
  6. ↑ "Capital Radio 194 Jingles & DJS". YouTube .
  7. ↑ Dean F. Berry, Sebastian Green (2016). Cultural, Structural and Strategic Change in Management Buyouts. p. 163-164. ISBN   9781349215591.
  8. ↑ Magnus Boström; Michele Micheletti; Peter Oosterveer (2019). The Oxford Handbook of Political Consumerism. p. 58. ISBN   978-0-19-062903-8.
  9. ↑ Finch, Julia (27 October 2001). "Where class wins over cash". Business. The Guardian . London. Retrieved 28 November 2020.
  10. ↑ "Sears sells womenswear business". Business. BBC News . BBC. 8 July 1999. Retrieved 28 November 2020. The troubled retail group Sears has sold part of its clothing business to rival Arcadia. The company is buying Sears' women's clothing business for £151m ($235m), including the Warehouse, Wallis, Miss Selfridge, Richards and Outfit brands. All Richards shops are to be closed, although Arcadia said it would retain 50 well-located stores and keep them open under different names.
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