Boohoo’s newly acquired brands to be made in Leicester factory

ONLINE retailer Boohoo has said that products for its newly acquired brands would be made in the new factory in Leicester, according to a report. 

The manufacturing of Dorothy Perkins, Debenhams and Wallis clothes moved overseas nearly 30 years ago.

Boohoo chief executive John Lyttle, told The Times that it focused on training workers to produce more complicated designs on recycled polyester, rather than just the simple jersey dresses. 

Boohoo opened its first factory in Leicester in January, two years after the online retailer was engulfed in a scandal about the poor treatment of workers in factories.

“This site will have its own profit and loss account, it is charged rent, it has to be a commercial operation,” Lyttle was quoted as saying by The Times. 

“I can remember as a young buyer you would come to Leicester for socks and knitwear, it was a huge textile industry but when everything shifted overseas it was decimated. This site will show that Leicester does have a great future.”

According to the retailer, they can produce items in just two weeks from design and one week on a repeated order in the UK, whereas it takes six months with overseas suppliers.

A woman poses with a smartphone showing the Boohoo app in front of the Boohoo logo on display in this illustration taken September 30, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo

Lyttle said: “We have bought some great British retail names in the past two years but the fact is they weren’t making in Britain. We are going to be making them in Britain and 40 per cent of those clothes in the UK are sold internationally, so we’ll be exporting again.”

He predicted that more companies shift to the UK and European manufacturing in the near future as container prices are "still very high.”

Boohoo was founded in 2006 by Carol Kane and Mahmud Kamani and floated in 2014 with a £560 million valuation when it was making £110 million in sales.

Since acquiring brands, including PrettyLittleThing, Debenhams, Coast, Oasis, and Warehouse, it made just shy of £2 billion in sales last year.

Kane said that investors had moved on from the company’s Leicester scandal and been reassured by its overhaul of its supply chain and independent review by Sir Brian Leveson.

The company said that using its new strict audit processes, it had culled about 400 factories to around 70. However, it was still producing the same volume of goods from Leicester.

The new factory, which has about 100 employees, currently produces 6,000 garments a week and will reach 20,000 when a second shift is introduced.

As well as sewing and cutting it also has two high-tech printing machines that can produce 40,000 graphic printed T-shirts a week.

Boohoo’s share price has fallen by three-quarters in the past year, valuing the business at £1.12bn, significantly below the level in July 2020.

When reports emerged that some Leicester workers in the company were being paid as little as £3.50 an hour, it lost around £1bn in valuation.