A BRANCH of a sportswear brand with over 300 stores is set to close its doors for good.
Outdoor clothing brand Trespass marked its impending goodbye in Bradford with signs in its window indicating a last ever sale.
The black and yellow signage read: “Closing down. Everything must go.”
The bad news comes not long after a nearby M&S shut for good, according to Yorkshire Live, due to “changing shopping habits”.
It’s not yet clear when exactly the Bradford branch will be shutting but The Sun have approached Trespass for comment.
The site in Bradford’s shopping complex The Broadway is the West Yorkshire city’s only Trespass store, forcing customers to shop online.
Alternatively, shoppers can visit their next nearest location in Halifax which is just over six miles away.
Despite the closure of the Yorkshire store, Trespass maintains a massive 300 stores globally, with some as far afield as Poland.
The brand sells skiwear, waterproof jackets, fleeces, festival accessories, walking boots and camping gear.
It comes after an Office shoes store in Bournemouth announced it would shut on September 7 – also with a sign, reported the Bournemouth Daily Echo.
Put up on its front door, it read: “Everything must go. Unfortunately, our Bournemouth store is closing.”
“However, you can still visit us online for all the hottest footwear brands.”
A store assistant from the Bournemouth branch confirmed to the Bournemouth Daily Echo that the site will officially shut on September 7.
It follows a string of high street closures in the Dorset coastal town.
They reported that the Accessorize store directly next store shut just one month earlier.
A Boots store in Bournemouth shut in April, while a Clintons closed its shutters just last week on August 11.
Office was founded in London back in 1981 and currently operates over 100 locations globally, around 80 of which are in the UK.
EMPTY shops have become an eyesore on many British high streets and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
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 are shutting a store and reopening a new shop at the other end of a 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 in the area 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
