Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Burton to complete shutdown of PH stores in April

The wrath of the pandemic continues to fall heavy on the fashion industry, as Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins, and Burton are shutting down their stores in the Philippines permanently beginning March and will complete the closure in April.

The famous British brands were owned by Sir Philip Green’s retail empire, Arcadia Group, which filed for bankruptcy in November 2020. Its brands were put up on sale and bought by online fashion retailers Asos and Boohoo in February this year.

The fashion house’s contemporary and stylish pieces are distributed in the Philippines through the Gokongwei Group’s Robinsons Retail Holdings, Inc. (RRHI). Reports of its shutdown were confirmed by RRHI’s representative in an interview with PhilSTAR L!fe today, Feb. 16.

“Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, and Burton are under the Arcadia Group and Arcadia Group entered into administration in the US and now, bought by Asus for Topshop, Topman and Dorothy Perkins and Boohoo for Burton. Both are online companies, which means that those brands will not be selling anymore to the offline stores. We really have no choice but to close all stores in the Philippines,” the company representative said.

The move was brought about by the continual decline in sales dating back to 2019 and further triggered by the pandemic in 2020 when they closed more than 20 stores by the last day of the year.

“Actually [sales] is very negligible now because we have been closing our fast fashion stores as early as last year. Even in 2019, we closed some and then a lot in 2020. [They had] very limited contribution to the total of Robinsons Retails sales,” the rep said.

Franchisees have also canceled their deals with the company, resulting in its total closure both offline and online. The company is set to stop the operations of its remaining three stores by April this year.

Topshop was founded by Raymond Montague Burton in 1964 as a small section in the basement of a store in Sheffield, England. It ran operations under the Burton Group, which also launched the brand’s male counterpart, Topman, in 1978. The following year, the group acquired the Dorothy Perkins chain.

In 1997, the Burton Group split up and restructured into the Arcadia group. It was acquired by Philip Green in 2002, and has since expanded to 2,750 stores worldwide.

Banner photos from Shutterstock; for illustration purposes only.