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ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » Despite being intrigued by its quirky brand name and high-profile advertising campaign, I haven't yet found the time to make a trip to ILVA since I moved to the North East.
And today it transpires that I'm not the only one.
As revealed on nebusiness this afternoon, the furniture retailer, an upmarket version of Ikea appparently, has gone into administration. A quick glance at its accounts reveal this was no surprise. In the last 12 months it made a loss of ã62m and its auditors were forecasting a struggle to survive. They weren't wrong.
We are still awaiting the fine details of the administration and the prospects for ILVA but it's fair to say they are not good. The thing about an economic downturn such as that we are seeing now is that it sorts out the strong from the weak. ILVA, its balance sheet demonstrates in quite stark terms, fell very much into the latter category.
So ILVA won't be the last big name to go. We are all anxiously awaiting news from ScS after trading in its shares were suspended earlier in the week. There is some hope that the business can be salvaged and at least it has a large estate and well-known trade name which does count for something.
ILVA, in contrast, never really got off the ground and its UK venture has been dogged by problems since it was first suggested it was coming to these shores in 2004. A colleague in the office who recently did make the trip to the Gateshead store said it was full of items with dramatically slashed prices - like a sofa being flogged off for ã200 that had been originally advertised for more than ã1,000. It was just about worth ã200, he reckoned, but he still didn't buy it.
Big-ticket items are undoubtedly the hardest to shift in these troubled times. And big ticket items that aren't really worth the big ticket attached to them are a particularly tough sell. It appears that may be where ILVA was going wrong.
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