British Home Stores (BHS) the high street retailer has entered into administration with a risk to ~ 11000 jobs. The store founded in 1928 and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 until 2000 when it was purchased by Sir Philip Green and taken private it later became a member of Green’s Arcadia group. In 2015 BHS was sold to the consortium Retail Acquisitions Ltd for the nominal value of £1.
Only last month there were reports of financial difficulties and the company sought a CVA (company voluntary agreement) It was said to have renegotiated its rents with its landlords. It had already in previous months closed stores in several major cities. It is rumoured to have a pension deficit of over £200 million .
This is the highest profile high street administration since the administration and closure of the Woolworth chain in 2008.
So what went wrong? From various reports I have heard today it seems that people fell out of love with BHS, they did not have a USP one person even said that the British in the name was a barrier. People only really shopped in the concessions. Their perceived main competitors are Debenhams, Marks and Spencer and Next, John Lewis, Heals and House of Fraser were seen as more up market high street competitors and Primark as a lower end rival. Presumably the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury could be see competitors.
In todays world of online shopping how did they compete. The main website does not appear to be responsive, though they do have a separate mobile website that kicks in when browsed via a mobile device. The mobile site does not have a friendly URL structure and does not translate when moving between mobile and desktop. They do appear to have an ios and android app.
The sites have the standard ecommerce look and feel. There is nothing unique in the design and like a number of sites the layout mimics other ecommerce sites. They do offer click and collect plus the usual delivery options of standard and express , payment methods are card based and paypal.
Intereseting today when I was looking at the checkout process I got the following page
This was prior to administration being formally confirmed so perhaps they had taken the site offline or as sometimes happens the site was overloaded due to sudden interest due to press attention. It would be interesting to see their visitor stats for the last couple of days and compare them with previous periods.
Interestingly they have not updated their twitter page since the weekend, and what will happen to the new Eastbourne food store that was annunce on twitter to have opened on 21st April.
Should you still buy whether pnline or instore is the question? Even though the site states they are trading as normal there has to be some question mark over goods being delivered at a later date and there would also be no guarantee you could return items. Filing for administration unfortunately must mean sales could be further impacted due to confidence in the offering.
