A POPULAR beauty brand has abruptly closed all stores without notice, leaving dozens of staff jobless.
Morphe has shut all seven standalone stores it operated across the UK, located on busy high streets and shopping centres.
All the stores closed for good on Wednesday, July 31, in a shocking move that has left 73 members of staff redundant.
The brand said it prioritises selling its makeup range in other shops and online stores, in a fresh blow to high streets.
The chain was founded in Los Angeles in 2008 and specialises in direct-to-consumer distribution of makeup and other beauty products.
The brand shot to fame in the 2010s after partnering with Shane Dawson, Jeffree Star, and a host of other celebrities.
A spokesperson for Forma Brands said: “We have therefore made the difficult decision to close our seven UK and one Amsterdam retail locations.
“This move aligns with our strategy to prioritize and expand our successful wholesale and e-commerce operations, similar to our model in the U.S.
“We also facilitated an ownership transition of our UK wholesale and e-commerce businesses, which will operate as Forma Brands UK LTD., effective immediately.”
Here’s a full list of the seven stores affected:
The move leaves dozens of staff members out of a job.
Many ex-staff members have taken to social media to share videos of them turning up at boarded-up stores.
Affected staff have been told they will not receive redundancy pay.
However, Forma Brands said: “In recognition of their dedication, the parent company Forma Brands LLC has provided goodwill payments to all affected employees, equivalent to an enhanced redundancy package.”
The closures mean that Morphe no longer operates standalone stores across the UK.
You'll normally be entitled to statutory redundancy pay if you're an employee and you’ve been working for your current employer for two years or more.
You’ll get:
The length of service is capped at 20 years.
Your weekly pay is the average you earned per week over the 12 weeks before the day you got your redundancy notice.
If you were made redundant on or after 6 April 2024, your weekly pay is capped at £700 and the maximum statutory redundancy pay you can get is £21,000.
If you were made redundant before 6 April 2024, these amounts will be lower.
However, the brand will continue operating its two concessions in Selfridges stores in London and Manchester’s Trafford Centre.
Morphe products will also continue to be sold at Boots and Superdrug stores.
Shoppers can also bag the brand online through ASOS, Look Fantastic and Sephora.
Popular retailers, such as Iceland, Boots, and Matalan, have been reducing the number of their high-street branches.
Several major ones have fallen into administration in the past year, including Wilko, Paperchase, and most recently, The Body Shop and Ted Baker.
The Body Shop collapsed into administration on February 13, putting its almost 198 branches at risk of closure.
Since then, it has closed down 82 locations.
However, it’s not all bad news for the high street, as several other retailers and hospitality venues have plans to expand.
Beer giant Heineken announced plans to invest £39million to help reopen 62 previously shuttered British pubs.
We have therefore made the difficult decision to close our seven UK and one Amsterdam retail locations
Spokesperson
Aldi has announced that it will open 35 new UK stores.
The openings form part of Aldi‘s long-term target of 1,500 stores in the UK.
The supermarket is set to invest £550million in expanding its UK footprint this year alone.
Aldi said each new store opening will create around 40 new jobs on average.
In recent months, Asda has been opening hundreds of convenience stores as it seeks to rival major players Tesco and Sainsbury’s.
B&M plans to open “not less than” 45 brand new stores across the UK in each of the next two consecutive years.
Purepay Retail Limited, the parent company of Bonmarché, Edinburgh Woollen Mill (EWM), and Peacocks, wants to open 100 new high-street stores over 18 months.
It has yet to give the exact locations where it will open the 100 stores or when they will open.
In recognition of their dedication, the parent company Forma Brands LLC has provided goodwill payments to all affected employees, equivalent to an enhanced redundancy package
Spokesperson
One of the UK’s favourite bakery chains, Greggs, has exclusively revealed to The Sun plans to open more outlet branches by the end of 2025.
Home Bargains, which was running just under 600 branches as of last June, has said it wants to “eventually have between 800 and 1,000 retail outlets open”.
The major discounter has stopped short of saying when it wants to reach the 1,000 store target.
Primark is also opening new branches and investing and renovating over a dozen existing shops.
Screwfix is set to open 40 new stores nationwide as its owner, Kingfisher, seeks to expand the DIY brand’s national presence.
The brand opened two new stores in March, and three new shops will open this month.
Tesco has revealed plans to open 70 more stores across the UK over the next year
WHSmith will focus on the travel side of its business, with plans to open new sites in airports, railway stations and hospitals.
The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
Empty shops have become an eyesore on many British high streets and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
In many cases, retailers are shutting stores because they are no longer the money-makers they once were because of the rise of online shopping.
Falling store sales and rising staff costs have made it even more expensive for shops to stay open. In some cases, retailers shut and reopened shops at the other end of the high street to reflect how a town has changed.
The problem is that when a big shop closes, footfall falls across the local high street, which puts more shops at risk of closing.
Retail parks are increasingly popular with shoppers, who want to be able to get easy, free parking at a time when local councils have hiked parking charges in towns.
Many retailers including Next and Marks & Spencer have been shutting stores on the high street and taking bigger stores in better-performing retail parks instead.
Boss Stuart Machin recently said that when it relocated a tired store in Chesterfield to a new big store in a retail park half a mile away, its sales rose by 103 per cent.
In some cases, stores have been shut when a retailer goes bust, as in the case of Wilko, Debenhams Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Paperchase to name a few.
What’s increasingly common is when a chain goes bust a rival retailer or private equity firm snaps up the intellectual property rights so they can own the brand and sell it online.
They may go on to open a handful of stores if there is customer demand, but there are rarely ever as many stores or in the same places.
