Hilding Anders acquires Feather & Black

Hilding Anders International AB (“HA”) has today announced that it is the new owner of Feather & Black (F&B). HA has purchased the business and certain assets and will continue to trade as F&B.

Pepyn Dinandt, Chairman and Group CEO, commented “I am very excited by this opportunity to re-enter the UK market with F&B. F&B has a strong market positioning, excellent customer loyalty and a deep heritage within the UK market. We will build on F&B’s solid platform and grow the business across both stores and ecommerce. We will continue with F&B’s current customer and product positioning whilst also looking at further ways to improve our productivity and profitability.”

Joanne Bennett, Group CFO, commented: “As a UK national, I have been aware of what the F&B brand stands for, the quality of its products and a regular visitor to my local F&B store for many years. I am also very excited by this opportunity to work with the team to build on the brand strength and grow the business together.”

The HA Group is one of the leading bedding and mattress companies globally, operating across the European, Russian and Asian markets. HA Group is the clear market leader in Europe and Russia. Although HA Group is a products company with a comprehensive portfolio, it also has, where necessary, retail activities in a limited number of geographies to support the growth of its premium product portfolio. HA has 26 brands across premium/international and strong regional/local segments together with a private label offering. HA is focused on 21 core markets with sales in over 60 countries worldwide. HA currently has 25 production facilities in 19 countries and over 9,000 employees producing a full range of bedding products. In Russia and China, HA has ~1,160 directly operated and franchised branded retail stores. HA had sales of EUR872m and EBITDA of EUR96m in 2016.

Paul Sweetenham will act as interim CEO. Paul is well known within the UK retail market and grew TK Maxx from ~100 stores to a European wide business with ~300+ stores and a strong ecommerce business.

 Pepyn Dinandt, HA Group Chairman and CEO