Gerry Weber

Part of the Portfolio since 2015.

Gerry Weber was, for decades, a comfortable German success: a women’s-fashion house from Halle in Westphalia, founded in 1973 by Gerhard Weber and Udo Hardieck to make women’s trousers, its labels (Gerry Weber, Taifun, Samoon) a fixture of the European high street and its shares a respectable mid-cap – listed since 1989 and promoted to the MDAX in 2011. The company even sponsored Steffi Graf and gave its name to a tennis tournament in Halle. Then it discovered, in sequence, every classic way for a retailer to destroy itself.

First, the universal retail sin: over-expansion of its own store estate. A wholesale brand that had prospered selling through other people’s shops decided to become a retailer itself, opening far too many of its own outlets and signing far too many leases, just as physical fashion retail entered its long decline. In 2015 it bought the fashion chain Hallhuber as well, for good measure. By early 2016 the company was announcing the closure of 100 stores; in late 2018 it announced up to 200 more. Revenue had already stalled at around €850 million by 2014/15, and the profits were heading the other way.

Second, the museum’s favourite detail: a fantastically over-engineered new automated central logistics centre in Halle-Künsebeck, opened in 2015, whose costs ran spectacularly out of control. There is a recurring pattern among doomed retailers – a love affair with a gleaming, too-clever warehouse, conceived in good times and delivered into bad ones. Gerry Weber built a cathedral to logistics it could not afford to fill; by 2019 even the founder conceded it had been too big and too expensive, and in 2021 it was sold to the Walbusch group.

Third, the quiet killer: the collections simply stopped exciting anyone. When the product loses its pull, the over-built store estate and the gold-plated warehouse stop being assets and become a fixed-cost trap with a fashion problem on top. The 2017/18 financial year ended with a net loss of about €172 million on revenue of roughly €795 million.

On 25 January 2019 the company filed for insolvency in self-administration. Some 120 German stores were earmarked for closure, and between autumn 2018 and November 2019 the group shut 189 of its own outlets. The funds Robus Capital and Whitebox, alongside J.P. Morgan, put up as much as €49.2 million; under the insolvency plan the share capital was cut from €45.9 million to a few thousand euros and the new money took all of the equity, leaving the founding families and the old shareholders with nothing. Hallhuber, sold off in 2019, needed its own protective-shield rescue the following spring.

And then it happened again. In 2023 the company had to restructure a second time under the new StaRUG procedure, closing another 122 stores and, in the financial part of the plan, cutting the share capital to zero – wiping out whoever had bought the listed shares in the meantime and extinguishing the Frankfurt listing on 4 December 2023. For those keeping score, the company, by now a GmbH, slid into insolvency yet again in March 2025. In May the international brand rights were sold to the Spanish Victrix Group, and the remaining German stores were to close. The name lives on; the company that carried it for half a century does not.

Three strikes, and the museum had to label the exhibit in pencil to leave room for updates.

Museum note: fashion is cyclical, so they say. Leases and warehouses, regrettably, are not.

Gerry Weber

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