Sales associate Simran Kaur adjusts products on the shelf at The Body Shop store in the Eaton Centre in Toronto on April 26.
“We saw, I swear, more sales and more people than Boxing Day and Black Friday,” Ms. Butler said. The difference was, on those holidays, Ms. Butler would temporarily hire roughly three times her usual staff to handle the rush. In March, amid a cash crunch, there was no staffing up. “I had to close the gate, and there was a lineup.”
The Body Shop Canada had also paid for some inventory that had been stopped at the border and returned to the U.S. distribution centre before the company filed for creditor protection, and made its own arrangements to complete delivery of those products. New shipments began arriving in stores in Canada in late April.
In early April, the U.K. administrators issued a “statement of proposals” saying they expect to put forward to creditors an arrangement that would allow the company to be “rescued and exit from administration.” They added, however, that a sale of the parent company was possible if creditors do not agree to such a plan. The U.K. administrators, FRP Advisory, did not respond to a request for comment.
“We see that quite a bit, actually, where the parts of a company are bought by different people, especially if they’re regional,” said Liza Amlani, founder of consulting firm Retail Strategy Group. The Body Shop Canada could hold on to the same product suppliers in such a scenario, she added. “They may need to rewrite some of those contracts because it might be tied to whoever owns the parent company.