Staff at Portsmouth-based Wiggle made redundant after company went into administration

WiggleCRC, which has its headquarters in Lakeside, North Harbour, has appointed FRP Advisory as administrators and the online giant has been put up for sale.

And as of October 31, the company has reportedly laid off about 100 of its 1,000 staff across its bases in Portsmouth and Belfast and its 320,000sq ft warehouse in Wolverhampton.

The company started life in 1995 as Butler’s Cycles before moving into online retail as Wiggle in 1999.

It became WiggleCRC in 2016 when it merged with its main rival, Chain Reaction Cycles, combining the two largest companies in the UK online cycle retail market. In 2021 the company was acquired by Signa Sports United (SSU) based in Berlin. Before the takeover, Wiggle CRC was the eighth largest privately owned company in the Solent region, with a turnover of £311m.

But in its most recently filed financial statement in August, WiggleCRC reported a pre-tax loss of £97m for the year to September 30, 2022.

A statement from the administrators said: "We’d like to reassure customers that all operations are running as normal, including the websites and online sales of Wiggle.com, ChainReactionCycles.com and Hotlines-UK.com. Customer service support is live and can be contacted with any queries through the respective websites."

Wiggle is currently maintaining that "all orders made with Wiggle will continue to be delivered as usual, and our standard terms and conditions still apply for item returns and warranty claims."

Last month SSU delisted itself from the New York stock exchange and announced a major programme of restructuring, which would include “the termination or winding down of non-performing assets,” and identified the bike sector as one that “continued to lag management expectations.”

Several days later SSU’s parent company Signa Holding announced that it would be withholding £130m of previously promised funding.

WiggleCRC called in the administrators on October 25.

However, joint administrator Alistair Massey has posted on Linkedin: “We are actively marketing the business for sale and are already in discussion with a number of interested parties so would encourage any potential buyers to get in touch without delay.”

Sky news has reported that Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group is considering a takeover deal. Last month he agreed to purchase German chain SportScheck, another subsidiary of SSU.

WiggleCRC had previously been seen as one of the “winners” of the pandemic, as many turned to cycling and exercise during the various lockdowns.

A WiggleCRC employee who wanted to remain anonymous said: “There had been rumours going around for a while that the company might be in trouble – we could see that things weren’t all roses. There have been quite a few redundancies across the company in recent years, so this hasn’t come totally out of the blue. That doesn’t make it any less worrying for the staff when we don’t know what our future holds or whether we’re all going to be laid off.”