Online home furnishings and accessories business HO Sparkles, which has traded from premises in Wokingham, Berkshire has called in administrators Paul Ellison and Gareth Roberts of KRE Corporate Recovery. The business, previously known as House of Sparkles, set up by Layla Chapman and her husband Dan, was put up for sale at the end of October claiming annual sales of £4.7 million derived from 16,000 orders, an active email subscriber database of 89,000 together with 330,000 Facebook and 140,000 Instagram followers.
It was a significant user of Facebook and Instagram advertising, had attracted celebrity clients, and is understood to have collapsed leaving many hundreds of customers without goods ordered and paid for. Ironically the business received positive coverage in the Daily Mirror as recently as May 2019 as an example of a successful enterprise started by the couple following their earlier business collapses.
According to recent research carried out by Begbies Traynor there is a significant number of pureplay online retail business on the brink of collapse and it says that the retail downturn is most definitely not restricted to those trading from stores.
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