AN OUTDOOR clothing retailer with 170 branches is to close a shopping centre store and has launched a huge closing down sale.
Trespass is to close its site in The Broadway in Bradford and has placed signs in its window indicating that a closing down sale has started.
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The retailer sells ski-wear, waterproof jackets, fleeces, festival accessories, walking boots and camping gear.
The black and yellow signage reads: “Closing down. Everything must go.”
The news comes not long after a nearby M&S shut for good, according to Yorkshire Live, due to “changing shopping habits”.
It’s not yet clear when exactly the Bradford branch will be shutting, but The Sun has approached Trespass for comment.
The site in Bradford’s shopping complex The Broadway is the West Yorkshire city’s only Trespass store, forcing customers to shop online.
Alternatively, shoppers can visit their next nearest location in Halifax which is just over six miles away.
It comes after Trespass, which runs around 170 UK branches, confirmed last summer it would pull down the shutters on half a dozen branches.
Stores shut in Chesterfield and Workington while others in Canterbury and Solihull were also earmarked for closure.
In recent weeks, Trespass is closed its store in St Johns Precinct, Liverpool, after signs were placed in the window.
It is not the only outdoor clothing retailer to shutter branches across the UK.
Go Outdoors closed one of its shops in North Staffordshire in April with locals left gutted.
Closing down signs also went up in a Millets store in December last year.
It came after the Millets stores in Inverness and Mansfield shut their doors for good.
Some retailers have closed a few branches here and there for various reasons, like when a store lease has come to an end.
Other examples of one-off rather than widespread closures is when there are changes in the area, like a shopping centre closing.
In some cases a shop will shut if there are not enough shoppers in the area, but sometimes it may relocate to another place that’s busier nearby.
Some chains have faced tougher conditions though, forcing them to shut dozens of stores, or all of them in the worst case.
WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING ON THE HIGH STREET
It is not just outdoor clothing retailers that have been shuttering branches in recent years.
The high street has been hit hard with shoppers’ budgets squeezed due to soaring inflation and high mortgage and rental costs.
Retailers have also had to contend with higher energy and wage costs, as well as spiking business rates.
The trend towards online shopping has steadily been growing over the last decade too.
Figures from the Centre for Retail Research reveal online sales accounted for 10.6% of all retail sales in 2012 and 26.5% in 2022.
It added that retailers such as Next and John Lewis and Partners now make just a small percentage of their sales from physical branches.
It’s partly these factors that have seen some notable brands fall into administration since the start of 2023, including Wilko, Paperchase and Ted Baker.
Meanwhile, Boots said last summer it would massively consolidate its store portfolio down from 2,200 to 1,900.
It has already shuttered 253 of the stores, with a further 47 yet to welcome in customers for the final time.
But it’s not all been bad news for retailers as a number have been expanding their presence and latching on to shoppers’ needs for food, clothes and other products on the cheap.
Discount giant B&M has opened 27 branches this year, while Aldi has its eyes set on opening hundreds more stores in the coming years.
Lidl is also eyeing up potential sites where it is keen to open shops while Paperchase has since returned inside Tesco branches.
Why are retailers closing shops?
EMPTY shops have become an eyesore on many British high streets and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
In many cases, retailers are shutting stores because they are no longer the money-makers they once were because of the rise of online shopping.
Falling store sales and rising staff costs have made it even more expensive for shops to stay open. In some cases, retailers are shutting a store and reopening a new shop at the other end of a high street to reflect how a town has changed.
The problem is that when a big shop closes, footfall falls across the local high street, which puts more shops at risk of closing.
Retail parks are increasingly popular with shoppers, who want to be able to get easy, free parking at a time when local councils have hiked parking charges in towns.
Many retailers including Next and Marks & Spencer have been shutting stores on the high street and taking bigger stores in better-performing retail parks instead.
Boss Stuart Machin recently said that when it relocated a tired store in Chesterfield to a new big store in a retail park half a mile away, its sales in the area rose by 103 per cent.
In some cases, stores have been shut when a retailer goes bust, as in the case of Wilko, Debenhams Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Paperchase to name a few.
What’s increasingly common is when a chain goes bust a rival retailer or private equity firm snaps up the intellectual property rights so they can own the brand and sell it online.
They may go on to open a handful of stores if there is customer demand, but there are rarely ever as many stores or in the same places