Kiddicare has a new owner. The nursery pureplay has been bought by Worldstores for an undisclosed sum, it was announced today.
Home and garden specialist Worldstores, which turns over £80m, currently sells 600,000 products from more than 1,600 suppliers across brands that include furniture and homewares retailer Worldstores.co.uk, private sales homeware site Casafina.com and discount modern design specialist Modern.co.uk.
Its acquisition of Kiddicare comes about two months after private equity investor Endless LLP bought Kiddicare from Morrisons as the supermarket moved out of non-core businesses following its launch of an online grocery business. Over the summer Endless restructured the Kiddicare business, returning it to the online business with a single, Peterborough, store that it was before it was bought by Morrisons.
Joe Murray, joint chief executive of Worldstores, said: “Kiddicare is a fantastic strategic fit for us – its customer base is very similar to our core Worldstores demographic and is at a life stage where it’s buying for the home, so there are many cross-marketing opportunities.
“Kiddicare has built a great reputation for itself with both its customers and suppliers and we look forward to creating an exciting long-term future for the business and its employees.”
Chris Yates, chief executive of Kiddicare, said: “Kiddicare has an important place in the nursery market and Worldstores is the ideal owner for the next phase of its growth. We all appreciate the hard work and diligence of the Kiddicare employees and Endless team to help restructure the business over the past few months and this transition is exactly what Kiddicare needs. We are all excited at what we can bring to our customers now we are under the Worldstores umbrella.”
