Parent company of Televisionwinkel.nl has filed for bankruptcy – update
The parent company of the web shop Televisionwinkel.nl has filed for bankruptcy. It concerns Create2Fit, which was founded by Marc Koster. Later, racing driver and entrepreneur Tom Coronel joined. This company also includes other web stores such as Koffiediscounter.nl.
The company’s management has confirmed that bankruptcy has now been filed. The staff was informed about this on Thursday morning. According to the Create2Fit website, the company has 65 employees; what the likely impending bankruptcy means for the employees of Create2Fit is not yet clear.
Create2Fit is the parent company of Television Shop.nl, but also of Koffiediscounter.nl, Barbecueshop.nl, Koffiestore.nl and Snow chains.com. The website Phurby.nl also belongs to Create2Fit, but this URL automatically links to the Create2Fit website. The various websites now have the message ‘temporarily closed due to circumstances’.
On all these websites it has been impossible to order a product for several days. The management deliberately disabled the shopping cart or the products could no longer be ordered anyway, because the status has been ‘out of stock’ for days.
It had been clear for some time that things were not going very well for the webshops of Create2Fit, which was founded in 2004. Marc Koster started the company, after which Coronel joined later. In 2009 a majority stake was sold to Wehkamp. That company came into the hands of British investor Apax Partners and its parent company RFS in 2015. They wanted to get rid of Create2Fit, after which Coronel took over the loss-making company for a euro, wrote the Entrepreneur.
Coronel and Koster wanted to breathe new life into the company, after which it was decided to divest some online stores and reduce the workforce. RTL Z wrote in November last year that the most recent annual accounts showed that the company made a loss of 284,000 euros between June 2016 and April 2017 and that the capital position was also ‘not strong’. Coronel said he expected to make Create2Fit ‘a profit machine’ again, but apparently that didn’t work out.
Update, Friday 11.00: The bankruptcy has now been declared and published.