Jaeger administrators confirm closures, redundancies

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jan 15, 2021

M&S’s deal to buy Jaeger completed on Friday and the administrators to the heritage brand have confirmed that all 63 standalone stores and the label’s concessions will not reopen after the current UK lockdown ends.

That means most jobs at the company have been lost with 211 store staff let go and 22 head office staff also being made redundant.

The closures and redundancies were widely expected and come after a year in which 177,000 retail jobs were lost in Britain. Only yesterday, another report predicted a further 400,000+ job cuts from the UK’s battered retail sector in 2021.

While Jaeger is part of new owner M&S’s strategy to add a number of new brands to its offer in order to boost its clothing operations online, with M&S’s own store estate being huge, it was never likely that the Jaeger stores would stay open.

It’s questionable how M&S can retain a distinct brand identity for Jaeger, but the company seems determined to do so with the plan being to keep it as a third-party label rather than wrapping it into its portfolio of own-brands.