By: Michael McGrail
With 21 major retailers filing for bankruptcy protection, 2017 went down as the busiest year for filings since The Great Recession. Working alone or with partners, our firm ran liquidation sales for Gander Mountain, Gordmans, RadioShack, MC Sports, Vanity, Sears Canada and hhgregg, to name a few. We also entered into multiple private deals involving undisclosed retailers, virtually all of which were household […]
By Andy Babcock and Ryan Davis
The metamorphosis of Amazon from a bookseller to one of the largest retailers on the planet has permanently changed the business landscape. Yet ABL lenders have hesitated to lend against inventory held at Amazon’s warehouses. Tiger Capital’s Andy Babcock and Ryan Davis assuage lenders’ fears. They explain how the Fulfillment by Amazon program benefits sellers and creates a seamless, profitable […]
At first glance, it might seem that national sporting goods chains should have the wind at their backs: U.S. personal income is expected to rise or hold through 2017, and researchers at Morgan Stanley cite dramatic growth in sports participation in North America, particularly among young people. According to IBIS World, in fact, the compound annual growth rate of the retail sporting goods market will […]
Apparel retailers targeting tweens and teens are taking a big hit. While we have already seen filings from the likes of Cache, Wet Seal, dELiA*s and Deb Shops, this is likely just the beginning of a larger trend. Amid dwindling sales at many (but not quite all) tween and teen-focused chains, the sector is positioned for further consolidation and additional filings.
In the heyday of the […]
U.S. consumers love gift cards. According to research firm CEB Tower Group, Americans loaded approximately $124 billion onto gift cards in 2014 alone. However, it is easy to see why, in the ABL world, the estate tends to regard gift cards as nothing to celebrate. After all, from the unsecured creditors’ perspective, accepting gift cards during the course of a liquidation sale is tantamount to […]
Baseball players often wax poetic about the “sweet spot”: that point where the bat’s barrel meets the ball and the result is a perfectly struck shot rising gloriously away from the batter’s box. You don’t need to watch it. Flip the bat to the batboy and start your trot; you know the ball’s gone. Liquidators also speak of the sweet spot—that point in a disposition […]
In the past, appraisers used basic principles such as comparative sales and market trends to place values on a collective of assets. Then, liquidators entered the picture, and the Net Orderly Liquidation Value (NOLV) model moved things in a far more sophisticated direction, with the actual costs associated with selling through those assets becoming the great variable. Achieving the highest NOLV means creating financial models […]
When Ron Johnson took the helm at J.C. Penney, he told The Wall Street Journal about his high hopes for the chain. “The department store is king of the hill in most countries I go to,” he said. “That’s what we want to achieve at J.C. Penney.” Unfortunately, the maestro behind Apple’s amazingly profitable stores was less successful, to put it mildly, in his 17 […]
For just about anybody in the business world, the term “metals” immediately calls to mind the fast-paced trading action of places like the London Metals Exchange, where fortunes rise and fall each day based on the flux in demand for aluminum, zinc, nickel, tin and a host of other metals. As a former metals analyst, I can attest to the fact that a veritable army […]
When creditors hired Tiger Group to liquidate the assets of Sherwood Brands, a U.S. candy manufacturer and distributor, the sale followed what might be thought of as today’s “new rules for maximizing asset recovery.” These new rules reflect the expanded role we believe we must play to be competitive in today’s fastpaced and more complex business culture. At some point, one could argue, we opened […]
