Next Floor T. M. Lewin: Going Down ...

The writing was on the wall in March 2019 when T. M. Lewin, the self-styled (and self-dressed?) 'expert shirt maker and tailor', formed a partnership with email marketing pioneers Kickdynamic, to "drive engagement and improve the customer experience". No-one we have spoken to knows what this means, but Kickdynamic had better be as good as their claim that they can 'Unlock Your True Potential With Dynamic Email', with the news coming sizzling off the press this morning stating that the new owners of T.M. Lewin (SCP Private Equity) called in restructuring firm ReSolve to close down most of its 66 stores and make it a principally online brand.

You could hear the gnashing of teeth at The Retail Gazette who claimed (in what was, in all certainty, a shrill and angry tone) that a pre-pack is on the cards, "putting hundreds of jobs at risk". NTI would like to put it on record that the whole point of a pre-pack is to save as many jobs as possible and the intervention is almost certainly the best way to make this happen. It is an interesting development, as SCP Private Equity only bought TM Lewin last month (for an undisclosed sum) and had already hired commercial property consultants from Cedar Dean to handle negotiations with landlords with the aim of securing rent cuts.

I don't know about you, but if I am buying a shirt for those formal Zoom videos I like to be able to feel the width and get someone with floppy hair and an indifferent set of A Levels to explain to me what collar stays are. Let's see where the pre-pack goes, but in the newsroom at NTI we rather suspect that that is how you'll be getting your shirts from T. M. Lewin in the very near future ... 'pre-packed', right?