Philip Bier,the co-founder of high street brand, Tiger, is to launch the first franchise of French toys and childrenswear retailer, ÏD Kids, in the UK. ÏD Kids primarily sells own-label products, making it a destination store for shoppers.
Philip and his wife Emma, who opened the first British Tiger store in Basingstoke in 2005, sold their stake in the retailer to its Danish parent company Zebra in January 2017. He has now created a company called Bier Brothers with his brother Jacob, a lawyer, which will bring the first ÏD Kids outlet to the UK.
The French parent company, which has a turnover of £750mn and is famed for its educational toys, trades globally from more than 1200 stores and owns eight brands including kidswear label Okaïdi and Oxybul.
Bier stated that he wants the new company to be “the preferred partner for foreign retailers who want to enter the UK. The ambition is to have six brands in five years’ time. Acknowledging that his business plan might seem like madness in the wake of high profile high street closures, he told The Guardian newspaper: “If you take Toys R Us they stood still and relied on doing the same thing for 25 years with no material change in their model. They just expected customers to turn up with a basket and fill it. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
Whilst the toy market shrank by 3% to £3.4bn in 2017, leading independent toy chain, The Entertainer, reported a 37% increase in annual profits to £11.5m for 2017. The children’s clothing market is forecast to grow by 8.1% between 2017 and 2022, according to retail analysts at GlobalData.
The first ÏD Kids branch in the UK will be located in Southside Shopping Centre, Wandsworth, where he says “The demographic is right and there is an incredible concentration of buggies…. The intention is to make it a national chain of probably 50 shops.” It is due to open in May.
