It is still advertised on the website: “Easter in style”, “a tidy spring” or “a particularly nice spring” that would start at home. But it is no longer possible to order Easter tableware or trendy cabinets. Online home furnishings store Fonq went bankrupt on Friday, a week and a half after the company had already applied for a deferral of payment. Anyone who has already ordered and paid for a product but has not received it is out of luck.
The bankruptcy marks a temporary end to a long series of attempts to make and keep the store profitable. Because although the online store has existed for almost a quarter of a century, it has not been able to achieve sustainable financial success.
A predecessor of Fonq was founded in 2003 by Patrick Kerssemakers, who took over and opened more web shops in the years that followed. From 2009 onwards, everything falls under the Fonq umbrella. Two years later, the store was taken over by Wehkamp’s parent company, which is owned by, among others, the experienced director and investor Ad Scheepbouwer (former CEO of KPN and PTT Post, among others). Those Dutch investors sold their share in Wehkamp in 2015.
A year after Scheepbouwer earned around 180 million euros, he took over Fonq. He sees, he says in a press release, a lot of room to grow the company: the “e-commerce market [is] not yet mature.” In the financial year before the takeover, Fonq’s turnover had already grown by about thirty percent, to 66 million euros. That turnover, says Scheepbouwer in Het Financieele Dagbladshould grow to 200 million euros.
That doesn’t work. Although turnover will still grow to 98 million in 2019. But in those years the company also lost five directors, closed online stores in France and Germany and narrowed its range to purely home furnishings. Nevertheless, Fonq will lose 5.7 million euros in 2019.
Temporary revival
Only the corona crisis that broke out a year later caused a temporary revival. While consumers are at home and physical home furnishing stores are closed, turnover grows to 103 million euros. The profit on this is limited: nine tons. And in the second year of the pandemic, turnover drops again to 80 million euros. In the following years, turnover will decrease further, in 2023 it will only be fifty million euros. The losses have now risen to almost fifteen million euros.
The cancellation of old loans and the granting of new ones by Scheepbouwer and the takeover of other web shops do not turn the tide. A new series of (interim) directors are also unable to make things profitable. Fonq sells approximately three hundred thousand products from a newly opened distribution center in Utrecht, from complete sofa sets and beds to spatulas and mashers. But becoming an indispensable and therefore economically profitable online store for consumers never succeeded.
It is still unclear whether the curators will succeed in finding a party that thinks they can achieve this with a restart.
