Despite several investor offers, the insolvent Theo Wormland GmbH has no future because no agreement has been reached between landlords and interested parties.
Location closures and layoffs
After the Osnabrück district court initiated preliminary proceedings in November, the clothing retailer’s insolvency proceedings were opened on January 28, Wormland announced on Wednesday. Since the company has not reached an investor solution, it is now being wound up.
As a result, the existing eight branches will no longer be open and around 250 employees will be laid off. The Hanover and Oberhausen locations will remain temporarily open and will be used to sell off inventory.
No agreement with landlords
There were several offers during the investor process, but they were not acceptable. The main reason is a lack of agreement between the potential investors and the landlords of the locations.
For this reason, the offers were tied to conditions that “would have automatically led to a high loss situation for Wormland if the company continued,” according to the statement. The risk would have been with the company’s creditors, which is why the provisional creditors’ committee decided to close Wormland.
One of the reasons for the retailer’s renewed bankruptcy was the reluctance to buy that the menswear trade is suffering from, it said in a statement in November. The current owner Lengermann & Trieschmann (L&T), which only rescued Wormland from the previous proceedings in mid-2024, also admitted strategic misjudgments.
“Looking back, as third-generation family business owners, we have made mistakes. Our strength is decades of retail expertise, but as investors we have no experience in company takeovers,” said Mark Rauschen, managing partner of L&T in November. “Out of an optimistic attitude, we preserved too much of what we found at Wormland in 2024. We got involved in the planning of the managing directors at the time and realized too late that we would have had to make many clearer and deeper cuts.”
This post was updated on January 28th at 2:39 p.m. with additional background information on the process.
