Hundreds of furniture suppliers and other unsecured creditors to the failed retailer Made.com are expected to receive less than 2% of almost £187m they were owed when the business collapsed earlier this month.
Creditors include an estimated 12,000 customers who had already paid for items, as well as Thurrock council, which is owed £658,000 and Islington council, which is owed £110,000, while several furniture suppliers are owed well over £100,000.
They will get no more than 1.6% of the money due to them before expenses, according to a report from administrators.
Among Made.com’s biggest unsecured creditors who will lose out are Facebook (owed £1.4m), Google (owed about £1.7m) and the operator of the group’s Antwerp warehouse (£1.8m).
However, Made.com’s main lender, Silicon Valley Bank, is likely to recover nearly all the £3.8m it is owed after the retailer Next bought the Made.com brand and database for £3.4m. Employees and HMRC, which is owed £3.57m, will also be paid in full.
About 4,500 items already on their way to customers are expected to be delivered. Administrators at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said that if an order had not arrived by 25 November, customers should know it would not be coming and they should submit a claim to them via email at uk_madedesign_creditors@pwc.com.
“We know that this will seem unfair to many customers who placed orders in good faith expecting them to be delivered. We would advise anyone affected to check their debit and credit card purchase protection agreements. We are sharing information with a major merchant services provider, enabling them to process refunds,” a PwC spokesperson said.
Administrators said £14.5m of stock had not be sold and was held in warehouses in the UK and Antwerp, or in transit to the UK. Most of that will be sold through the auctioneers John Pye to raise cash for creditors.
Made.com’s Trouva site, which sells branded homewares, fashion and accessories, continues to trade and administrators are seeking a buyer. A sale of the business, which Made bought just four months ago, is expected to be concluded by the end of 2022.
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Administrators from PwC were appointed to Made.com on 9 November, completing a reversal of fortunes for the London-based retailer, which was valued at almost £800m when it listed on the stock exchange in June 2021 and heralded as the future of furniture retail. More than 300 people were made redundant when the company went into administration and nearly all 500 employed at the time are expected to lose their jobs.
