“It’s a cold shower”: Pimki announces the closure of about a hundred stores, the reduction of 496 jobs

The pace of store closures for ready-to-wear brand Pimkie is accelerating and increasing. It is not surprising that this Thursday morning the management announced a new plan at the Extraordinary Social and Economic Committee (CSE) in Villeneuve-d’Ascq (North), less than a year after the signing of the first PSE, which already planned closure by 2027. from 63 stores.

From then on, 97 stores will close between the summer of 2022 and the end of 2024 – or almost one in three of the initial approximately 300 stores in France. Everyone had to return the keys by the end of the year. For 23 of them this was already done on December 31st.

“The employees won’t have time to turn around”

This restructuring will be accompanied by 496 job cuts within the brand, which still employed 1,375 staff at the end of December. In addition to the store clerks doomed to disappear, 42 head office employees out of 143 will also lose their jobs. Some have already left the company: at the end of 2023, 82 economic layoffs were registered.

“It was a cold shower, it was a tsunami that hit us. “We are very angry,” sighs Marie-Annick Mercer, a CFDT union representative and saleswoman in Brest (Finistère) for 37 years. Do you realize that the 36 new stores in question are due to close in July next year? It’s so short for the employees that they won’t have time to turn around…”

At noon, staff representatives did not yet have an exact list of the stores they had promised to close. “But we know that in Bordeaux, where there were five stores, there will be nothing left, and so will it be in Lille,” points out Marie-Annick Mercer.

14 stores associated with the Miniso brand

In a press release, Pimkie management justified its decision on the basis of “the economic context, declining retail traffic and inflation” that “significantly impacted sales and economic results.” This therefore adds a little more burden to the restructuring plan initiated by the new managers of the brand, which was sold at the beginning of 2023 by the Mulier family to a consortium of buyers (Lee Cooper France, Amoniss and Ibisler Tekstil).

Pimkie also announces that it wants to “diversify its activities by adding 14 other stores in its network to the Miniso brand,” a Chinese accessories chain that opened in France in 2021 under the leadership of several investors, including a former Canal+ journalist. Ariel Wiseman turned entrepreneur.

The connection between the mid-range ready-to-wear collections and Miniso’s very wide range of inexpensive products – beauty products, soft toys, jewelery, stationery – does not seem obvious. But this should allow, Pimki assures, “to save 96 positions.”

“I do not understand how the relevant employees will remain after the transfer of their positions. They will no longer even be dependent on the same collective agreement,” argues Marie-Annick Mercer.

Two new stores to test a new concept

In a press release, Elodie Chelle, deputy general manager of Pimkie, announces a “new Pimkie store concept” scheduled to open “in the coming weeks.” The challenge: “to reinvent the Pimka experience and work on its desirability among our target audience of 18-25 years old. » Two test stores in Nantes and Amiens will be affected.

Will this be enough to save a brand created in 1971 and shaken, like many others, by the crisis that has been affecting the clothing sector for months now, successively shaken by the development of e-commerce, the health crisis, inflation? Some brands have not recovered (Camaïeu, Kookai). “2024 will not necessarily be the year of the recovery of middle-class ready-to-wear,” estimates Gilles Minvielle, an economist at the French Fashion Institute. Even if inflation slows, prices will continue to rise, and new low-price players are finding their place in this crisis economy,” citing the development of Chinese site Shein and British site Primark.