The owners of Petmania, a family-owned chain of 15 pet stores, will seek the appointment of an examiner to the business in the High Court tomorrow morning.The court will consider a petition to put three related companies into examinership in a bid to restructure their finances.
The companies are Petmania, furniture retailer Meubles (Ireland) and O’Keeffes of Kilkenny, which runs a garden centre in the city. The group was founded by the O’Keeffe family in the 1970s.
The Petmania business started in 2005 in a section of the family’s garden centre, but expanded quickly in the following years. It has about 250 staff.
In an interview with The Sunday Business Post a year ago, Petmania managing director Shane O’Keeffe, a nephew of the founders, said that the group hoped to have 20 pet shops around the country by 2012.
Petmania made a loss of almost €645,000 in the 12 months to the end of May 2009, which it said was ‘‘as expected, given the building of its new store network’’.
It had a deficit of €731,000 on its balance sheet and owed €6.2 million to its parent, O’Keeffes of Kilkenny, at the end of the financial year.
The latest accounts for the parent company show it had accumulated profits of €3.5 million in May 2009, but had outstanding bank loans of €3.8 million and also owed €4.2 million to its directors.
Sad to see a long-established business like Meubles being brought down by a foray into another unrelated business.
The old adage of "Stick to the knitting" is very important today.
Unfortunately they didnt move with the times. ie the down turn from the high end of the Pet Food market to the medium & lower priced products!! It didnt have the same effect in the UK, but thats the way the trend has been going in Ireland the last year.
ReplyDelete