Thu, 07 Nov 2013 | MBO/MBI
After four years in the making, a management buyout of Otter House group, the owner of Calendar Club, has been completed.
The founding directors sold their shares to the new business, to be headed by directors from Calendar Club, Otter House, and Carousel Calendars. The deal was financed by HSBC. David Pike, the group’s managing director, headed the MBO and will now seek to add more complementary businesses in the sector.
“It’s such as relief to get the management buyout over the line. It was a long time getting there – I first started working on the deal in 2009. The most important factor was that the funding environment wasn’t very good at that time, which made it difficult,” Mr Pike told Insider Media.
Otter House comprises greetings cards and gifts maker Otter House, calendar publisher Carousel Calendars and retail chain Calendar Club, which has 300 stores across the UK. The companies are based in Exeter, and were relocated to a 150,000 sq. ft. distribution centre in the city in 2011.
Established in 1997 by Gary Beck and Hendrik Vollers, Calendar Club started out by selling from temporary units and booths in 1998. It has since become a familiar sight at Christmas time in shopping centres and high streets. The group’s head office staff numbers are boosted to 190 from the usual 130 over the Christmas season.
It installs itself in pop-up units over Christmas especially, with commercial landlords particularly fond of Calendar Club as “they know that if they have a gap in their tenancies, we can fit out a shop within 24 hours”, Mr Vollers said in 2011.
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