Mamas and Papas has announced what they called ‘a realignment of its store portfolio’. Certain assets of Mamas & Papas (Retail) Ltd have been sold to other companies in the Mamas & Papas Group through a pre-pack administration. Pre-pack administration is an insolvency procedure where a company arranges to sell its assets to a buyer before appointing administrators to facilitate the sale. It’s a powerful, legal way of selling the business on to a trade buyer or third party.

Mamas & Papas have closed six unprofitable stores – in Aberdeen, Preston, Milton Keynes, Lincoln, Leamington and Fareham. The remaining ones will continue to trade as normal as will the M&P website. Customer orders will still be fulfilled.

There will also be up to 54 job losses at the head office in Huddersfield but details have yet to be confirmed.

More and more customers are shopping online and as we have seen with many other retail chains, high street bricks and mortar operations are becoming too expensive to maintain. In addition, Mamas & Papas have had to deal with the legal fallout of selling dangerous car seats which is bound to have severely impacted profits.

Riccardo Cincotta, Executive Chairman of Mamas & Papas, said:

“These actions are always difficult but they are also necessary in a challenging market to ensure Mamas & Papas achieves its considerable future potential.  We remain fully focussed on maintaining our position as the UK’s most popular nursery brand.

“We will continue to review our store portfolio in the light of customers’ changing behaviour and we remain fully committed to an omni-channel offering that reflects their evolving needs.

“Our digital performance is tracking ahead of expectation, our wholesale distribution in the UK and internationally continues to grow and our in-store Personal Shopping Experience remains highly valued by our customers.”