A TRENDY fashion chain owned by H&M is set to close another store as it slowly disappears from the high street.
Clothes retailer Monki is closing down its store in Birmingham this month.
The brand is known for its colourful designs and is a popular place for trend-conscious Gen Z shoppers looking to buy low-rise and baggy jeans.
But the store is set to vanish as H&M continues with plans to integrate the brand with another one of its fashion lines, Weekday.
As part of the process, Monki branches will either be closed or converted into Weekday multi-brand stores.
To help shift stock before it closes, the retailer has launched a major closing-down sale, according to Birmingham Mail.
The store will close this month on March 9.
Its branches across Manchester and Newcastle closed in January.
The remaining stores in London, Bristol, and Sheffield will also close this year or be transformed.
The Monki brand will remain and will be sold on weekday.com and in Weekday multi-brand stores this year.
A previous statement from H&M read: “A limited number of Monki stores are intended to be transformed into multi-brand Weekday destinations, while the others are intended to be closed.”
“The newly formed Weekday multi-brand destination will cater to customers’ high aesthetic standards while embracing their multitude of unique expressions.”
As part of this process, H&M has also revived its Cheap Monday brand after nearly six years off the high street and began selling it online and in selected Weekday stores.
The fashion line was a hit during the early noughties, but H&M axed it in 2018, blaming poor sales.
Weekday currently has five locations in the UK, all of which are in London.
Like Monki, it caters towards a younger audience and sells trendy fashion pieces.
TROUBLE ON THE HIGH STREET
Plenty of other retailers are closing stores across the high street as households lean more towards online shopping and amid high business rates.
Soaring inflation in recent years has also dented shoppers’ pockets.
The Centre for Retail Research’s latest analysis suggests 13,479 stores, the equivalent of 37 each day, shut for good in 2024.
Of those, 11,341 were independent shops while 2,138 were shut by larger retailers.
The data also showed over half the stores that closed last year were shut due to the store or retailer going through insolvency proceedings.
This is when formal measures are taken to deal with tackling a business‘s debt.
Retailers are shutting stores in 2025, too.
New Look is ramping up a store closure programme ahead of April’s National Insurance hike.
Approximately a quarter of the retailer’s 364 stores are at risk when their leases expire.
This equates to about 91 stores, with a significant impact on its 8,000-strong workforce.
The company has restructured its store estate twice in the past six years, reducing its portfolio from around 600 UK stores in 2018.
It also closed all of its 26 stores across Ireland, marking the end of a two decade tenure in the country.
RETAIL PAIN IN 2025
The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury’s hike to employer NICs will cost the retail sector £2.3billion.
Research by the British Chambers of Commerce shows that more than half of companies plan to raise prices by early April.
A survey of more than 4,800 firms found that 55% expect prices to increase in the next three months, up from 39% in a similar poll conducted in the latter half of 2024.
Three-quarters of companies cited the cost of employing people as their primary financial pressure.
The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year.
It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: “The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025.”
Professor Bamfield has also warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector.
“By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer’s household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020.”
