Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
Department stores Debenhams and Liberty are reported to be weighing up an idea to help newly-weds left high and dry by the failure of Wrapit.
Peter Gelardi, the company’s former managing director – who has now lost his job with the wedding gift company following its collapse into administration on Monday – is in talks with the stores about setting up a voucher scheme.
If the idea were to be taken up, Wrapit’s bank HSBC would provide couples with vouchers to the value of wedding list merchandise still to be delivered. The vouchers could then be redeemed at participating stores.
Sixty-two-year-old Gelardi said the stores were interested, but that the scheme would have to be approved by administrators KPMG and HSBC.
HSBC has already rejected Gelardi’s suggestion that, instead of making £4m of refunds to customers who had bought gifts with credit cards it should supply the gifts, at a cost of just £3m.
Yesterday, protesting brides – wearing full wedding regalia – demonstrated outside HSBC’s head office in London’s Canary Wharf. They delivered a 950-signature petition demanding that the bank arrange delivery of gifts or refund guests who had paid for them.
The failure of Wrapit joins that of two other businesses of which Peter Gelardi has been a director. Telephone companies World Telecom and Global Numbers both went into receivership in 2000.
No one at Debenhams or Liberty was available to comment on the voucher scheme proposal.
