Entrance to an André shoe store. Photo taken on January 25, 2017 in Dunkirk (northern France) (AFP/PHILIPPE HUGUEN)
The shoemaker André is again in difficulty: the Nanterre commercial court placed the company 1Monde9, which has owned the historic brand since 2020, in receivership in early February, AFP learned on Wednesday, confirming information from the economic media in L’Informé line.
The company 1Monde9 of the buyer of André François Feijoo, former CEO of the group founded at the end of the 19th century, declared the cessation of its payments on January 27 and requested the opening of a receivership procedure, which was made on February 2, according to the court judgment that AFP consulted on Wednesday.
1Monde9, based in Puteaux in the Hauts-de-Seine, employs, according to this document, 280 employees and claims an annual turnover excluding taxes of just under 31 million euros.
The Commercial Court of Nanterre has set a next hearing date for March 30 at 10 a.m., to “rule if necessary on the continuation of activity”.
Employed at André in 1992 and dismissed in 2021, Tania Rome, former FO central delegate, judges that this receivership is due to “malfunctioning, bad decisions and a bit of the Covid”.
“We were immediately put on partial unemployment” when François Feijoo took over the company, said the ex-employee, indicating that she was one of the 17 staff representatives to have sued 1monde9 for “wrongful dismissal”.
It was already at the helm of a commercial court that the brand had been taken over by François Feijoo in July 2020, keeping only 55 stores (out of 180 points of sale then) and 13 affiliates. Its recovery plan then provided for the dismissal of just under 200 jobs.
André, a brand more than a century old, was the first distribution company to have been placed in receivership due to the Covid-19 crisis, which had left its stores closed for many months.
It was previously owned by the online sales site Spartoo, and even earlier, by the former flagship of French textiles Vivarte, which was also originally called Groupe André.
André is part of the long list of brands that belonged to the Vivarte group today facing financial difficulties, like Kookaï, also placed in receivership at the beginning of February.
© 2023 AFP
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