As soon as a fashion chain goes bankrupt, one thing is almost certain: sooner or later Martijn Rozenboom will appear. The entrepreneur has a preference for stores that have gone bankrupt. One time he finances the relaunch, the next he buys up their household effects. His most recent acquisition: the contents of fashion chain Score, which collapsed last month.
This Tuesday it was announced that Rozenboom will immediately put the contents of thirty stores of the chain on sale. Score staff were informed of this last Friday.
Score went bankrupt together with clothing brand Chasin’ last month. They are part of the same company with about 50 stores and 450 employees. It is still being investigated whether the chain “can be continued in a different way” is stated in a press release issued by Rozenboom together with Score’s receiver.
Rozenboom emphasizes in the same message that he will not become ‘the owner of the Score brand’ and that he does not want to continue the retail chain, but that this only concerns the empty sale of the contents. His spokesperson would not say how much Rozenboom paid for this.
In recent years, Rozenboom has been involved in numerous acquisitions and partial restarts of clothing chains – often at large, well-known companies. Employees of some of these chains told NRC rather that Rozenboom subsequently hardly invested in the stores. The real goal, they said, was to sell stocks as quickly as possible at the lowest possible cost.
Free Record Shop
In 2013 he reported as a buyer for the bankrupt Free Record Shop, at that time the largest music and video chain in the Netherlands. The trustees then held off; the stories that circulated online about him and his method put them off.
At McGregor, Gaastra, Adam Brandstores, SuperTrash, Expresso, Claudia Sträter, Promiss and Miss Etam, the ‘company doctor’ managed to convince the trustees, but Rozenboom rarely succeeds in making retail chains ‘healthy’ again. Staff are sometimes on the street again after a few weeks.
Rozenboom was recently at odds with the curator of Miss Etam. That fashion chain went bankrupt at the beginning of 2021. Rozenboom reported as rescuer, but the restart failed. At the end of last year, the curator of Miss Etam demanded 4.5 million euros from Rozenboom through a lawsuit. Rozenboom had, according to the trustee, played a trick whereby the companies were organized in such a way that all costs remained in companies that collapsed, but all turnover was earned in BVs that the entrepreneur kept. In short: this meant that Rozenboom did receive income, but expenses lagged behind in the bankruptcy.
Rozenboom acknowledged that Miss Etam was a “complex takeover”, but did not say a word about the bankruptcy deficit of 4.5 million euros. Whether Rozenboom has to pay the millions is not yet known. The verdict has not yet been pronounced and will come later this year. A spokesman for Rozeboom says: “He looks forward to the verdict with confidence.”