£40m of ‘high end’ homes & garden stock up for auction
IT looks like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie when the dangerous ancient treasure is locked in a wooden box and wheeled into a warehouse packed floor to ceiling with loads of other top secret items.
But these boxes will be opened and people will be allowed to buy their contents. A Welsh auction house will sell £40 million worth of Made.com’s stock following its collapse. The vast majority of the stock will be sold at John Pye Auctions in Port Talbot before Christmas.
The auction house said administrators had instructed it to sell the entirety of the company’s UK stock inventory. It has been expecting more than 30,000 items from the high end store, which will begin to go online this weekend.
The auctions will be held several days a week in the run-up to Christmas and well into the New Year. All of the auctions will be online and people will be able to bid on an exclusive range of brand new items for every room in the house and garden, the auction house confirmed.
New items will be added each week and will give everyone the chance to grab premium stock at a fraction of the retail cost.
John Pye’s weekly auctions will contain: sofas, sideboards and TV units, beds and bedding, tables and chairs, kitchen and cookware, soft furnishings (throws, cushions, curtains), artwork and decorative objects and more.
To get involved, you can register your interest at www.johnpye.co.uk/ made. You will be able to view the products in the auction today, although all stock is in brand new condition. There will be a guaranteed home delivery option within a couple of days of purchase.
Administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said there would be 399 job losses at Made.com. Most of these will be redundancies.
The chief executive of Made.com, Nicola Thompson, previously apologised to customers affected by the business going bust, adding that the firm had “fought tooth and nail” to avoid it. The retailer sourced furniture directly from designers and manufacturers and gained a loyal base of younger customers. Last year, it was valued at £775m.