Fashion giant Mosaic Brands is set to close down five of its major retail franchise chains.
Rockmans, Autograph, Crossroads, W.Lane and BeMe brands – including their stores and websites – will be shut down, Mosaic CEO Erica Berchtold confirmed.
The company is ‘s largest women’s fashion retailer group and had employed more than 4000 staff in more than 700 stores around .
Ms Berchtold said the shuttered brands had ‘become marginal and non-core’ and closing them would allow the company to focus on its remaining five.
‘Each of those core brands will have a clearly differentiated market proposition, target customer, price point and product range.’
The group will now focus on Millers, Noni B, Rivers and Katies.
‘Whilst the operational details of the rationalisation plan, including store closures, continue to be worked through, we will seek to minimise the impact on our team, including where possible reassigning impacted team members into roles within the five core brands.
Mosaic said it intended to ‘continue to focus on servicing regional .’
According to Mosaic’s financial report from August 2023, it had 150 Rockmans stores, 49 Autograph stores and 32 W.Lane stores, while BeMe and Crossroads are online-only stores.
Some of the Rockmans, Autograph and W.Lane stores could be converted to its remaining core brands.
Professor Gary Mortimer, Queensland University of Technology Business School retail expert, said Mosaic Brands made the mistake of ‘essentially creating multiple brands to market to the exact same audience – middle aged, middle class woman’.
‘If you walk into a shopping centre, you will find at least two, if not three, of those brands all competing for the same customer and that just duplicates and triplicates the cost of doing business,’ he told News Corp.
Professor Mortimer likened the overlap to what Kmart and Target – both owned locally by Wesfarmers – were doing, often competing against themselves.
Mosaic currently has a total of around 763 stores across and New Zealand but has been trying to focus more on big-box Rivers megastores in regional as part of its ‘BIG strategy’.
Earlier this year Mosaic had problems as it migrated to a new supply chain system, and had little inventory on hand for the key Mother’s Day trading period.
The company’s shares have been suspended from the ASX since September 2 because of a delay on filing its 2023/24 financial report, which was due in August.
Mosaic said on Monday the delay was due to events outside the reporting period, which would impact disclosures accompanying the audited results.
It was working with partners and stakeholders and had the support of its senior lender, Mosaic said.
In February, Mosaic said it made a $5.4 million net profit, up 38 per cent from the previous quarter.
But it also ended 2022/23 with a net liability position of $66 million, including $39 million in debt and $45 million in lease liabilities, which its annual report noted ‘may cast significant doubt on the group’s ability to continue as a going concern’.