Furniture firm collapses into administration

A furniture company in West Yorkshire has gone into administration, blaming "challenging trading conditions".

Moores Furniture Group, based in Wetherby, employed more than 450 people and was founded in 1947 supplying kitchens to housebuilders, the public sector and affordable housing developers.

James Clark and Will Wright from Interpath have been appointed joint administrators and confirmed they had sold the firm's customer list and certain other intellectual property assets to Wren Trade Kitchens Limited, a subsidiary of Wren Kitchens Ltd.

They said they had retained about 336 staff to support the completion of some work, but have made 124 employees redundant.

The administrators said they would be providing support to those impacted, including supporting them with the information required to make claims from the Redundancy Payments Service.

Clark said: "The strong headwinds facing the UK construction industry continue to have an impact on companies up and down the supply chain."

He said the firm had made "strong progress" cutting costs but had "experienced challenging trading conditions" due to rising costs and low levels of housebuilding activity.

The firm had tried to look at options for further investment or the sale of the company to no avail, he added.

He said the sale of intellectual property to Wren "provides an opportunity to minimise disruption for customers and suppliers, and which will enable Moores' heritage in kitchen manufacturing to continue as part of the Wren family".

Wren Kitchens Ltd said it was sorry Moores had entered into administration.

"Whilst the company was a competitor of ours, we believe it is in everyone's interests to have a strong kitchen industry based here in the UK," the firm said.

It said they had been in talks with Moores but were unable to save the business.

"We have however agreed an exclusive option to provide customers affected by this situation with the ability to seamlessly transfer outstanding contracts over to us."

They said their contract division had recently announced plans for a sales office in Harrogate and said they had agreed with the administrator to see if there were opportunities "to provide alternative employment to a significant number of Moores sales, operations and internal support teams".

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