A POPULAR home interiors chain is closing up one of its stores after years in the business.
Founded more than 25 years ago, the homewares company has four stores including Preston, Bowness, Blackpool and Kendal.
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The Kendal branch of Fab Home Interiors will be shutting its doors imminently.
While Fab Home Interiors bosses confirmed the Kendal shop will be closing after “careful consideration of market conditions,” it was planning on opening another store in the region.
“We want to express our heartfelt gratitude to our customers at the Kendal site for their unwavering support over the years,” Scott Jones, the brand’s co-owner told The Mail.
“This decision was not made lightly, and we appreciate the relationships we have built with the community.”
It’s not all bad news for fans of the Kendal store, as Scott and his team are throwing a massive clearance sale to help move the stock.
“We have over a million pounds’ worth of stock,” Scott said.
“We have no official closing date, it will be once we have sold everything, which may take a few months – there are a lot of things to sell.”
Scott and his co-founder have more than 25 years retail experience and between them are award-winning interior designers who help with many of the products designed in-house.
“We eat, sleep and breathe interior style – so you are in safe hands when you shop with us,” their website reads.
Fab Home Interiors’ shuttering of its Kendal store comes amid a trend of brick and mortar shops closing down.
Brands such as FarmFoods, Sports Direct, WHSmith, Shoezone, Morrisons and Beaverbrooks are closing some of their stores around the country.
Plenty of other retailers are closing stores across the high street as households lean more towards online shopping and amid high business rates.
Soaring inflation in recent years has also dented shoppers’ pockets.
The Centre for Retail Research’s latest analysis suggests 13,479 stores, the equivalent of 37 each day, shut for good in 2024.
Of those, 11,341 were independent shops while 2,138 were shut by larger retailers.
RETAIL PAIN IN 2025
The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury’s hike to employer NICs will cost the retail sector £2.3billion.
Research by the British Chambers of Commerce shows that more than half of companies plan to raise prices by early April.
A survey of more than 4,800 firms found that 55% expect prices to increase in the next three months, up from 39% in a similar poll conducted in the latter half of 2024.
Three-quarters of companies cited the cost of employing people as their primary financial pressure.
The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year.
It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: “The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025.”
Professor Bamfield has also warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector.
“By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer’s household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020.”
