The brand new house owners of The Physique Store are lining up tens of hundreds of thousands of kilos in new financing as they finalise a deal to purchase the chain out of administration.
Sky Information has learnt that Aurea, an funding firm led by Mike Jatania, a cosmetics entrepreneur, is in superior talks to safe greater than £30m in working capital from Hilco Capital, a prolific investor in and lender to the retail business.
Banking sources mentioned that the deal between Aurea and FRP Advisory, The Physique Store’s directors, was prone to be finalised inside days.
If confirmed, the brand new debt from Hilco could be used to assist place the cosmetics chain again on a progress footing, the bankers mentioned.
Hilco is a daily bidder for and financier to retailers, having lately lent cash to Superdry and bought a parcel of shops operated by Homebase, which it owns.
FRP, Aurea and Hilco all declined to remark.
An public sale of The Physique Store was launched earlier this yr after FRP concluded that an alternate restructuring of certainly one of Britain’s best-known excessive road retailers was not viable.
The Physique Store now trades from roughly 100 shops following a store closure and redundancy programme undertaken since its collapse into insolvency.
The corporate’s administration underlined the decline of a excessive road stalwart based by the late Dame Anita Roddick and her husband Gordon half a century in the past.
It has had a string of householders together with Natura & Co, a Brazilian firm which was reported to have paid greater than $1bn to purchase it in 2017.
Aurelius, an funding agency, owned The Physique Store for a matter of weeks earlier than discovering that its monetary place was worse than anticipated.
