Naf Naf goes into receivership again
Another setback for French fashion chain Naf Naf, struggling to find its place within the highly disrupted mid-market ready-to-wear segment in France. Trade unions have revealed that Naf Naf's management has told employee representatives the company has filed for judicial receivership, only a year after it was acquired following receivership proceedings with the trade court in Bobigny. Naf Naf went into receivership in September 2023, and was then bought by one of its suppliers, Turkish producer Migiboy Tekstil, in June 2024.
At the time, Naf Naf operated a fleet of 100 directly owned monobrand stores, and had some 530 employees.
In a press release, the CFDT union condemned what it calls a replica of a 'catastrophic scenario... Once again, [Naf Naf's] employees have been placed in a situation of extreme uncertainty and their jobs are at risk. This news is all the more shocking as the management had spoken for several months, in extremely reassuring fashion, about the company being in a position to continue to trade,' said the union.
The Sud union too was upset by the fresh difficulties faced by the employees. 'The only prospect for us is having to huff and puff again every month to receive our salary on time, since wages will fall under the control of AGS [the organisation that manages the insurance scheme for workers' wages], while fewer of us will be working in hollowed-out stores and will eventually risk, in the middle of the summer holidays, being hit by store closures and a new wave of redundancies,' said the union.
Naf Naf was founded by the Pariente brothers in 1973. Between 2020 and 2023, it was owned by Franco-Turkish group SY International, which bought the chain during previous receivership proceedings. Before then, Naf Naf had been the property of French group Vivarte, which sold it to Chinese group La Chapelle in 2018. Migiboy Tekstil was Naf Naf's fourth owner in less than a decade.
On May 21, at a meeting to discuss the company's situation with employee representatives, the group said it wanted to implement a business continuity plan as part of its application for judicial protection. The last reported revenue result for Naf Naf was €141 million in fiscal 2022.
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