Claire’s has been a fixture of UK shopping centres for so long that its troubles have felt, at times, less like a single crisis and more like a slow-motion unravelling — one that, looking back, actually played out as two distinct administrations within the space of six months.
The first came in August 2025, as fallout from the US parent company’s Chapter 11 filing spread to its international operations. On 13 August, Claire’s Accessories UK Ltd entered administration, with around 300 stores across the UK and Ireland — 278 in the UK, 28 in Ireland — putting more than 2,150 jobs at risk. Interpath Advisory’s Will Wright and Chris Pole were appointed to handle the process. Unlike some UK retail collapses that end in wholesale liquidation, this one produced a rescue: investment firm Modella Capital, which already owned The Original Factory Shop and had recently taken control of WHSmith and Hobbycraft, stepped in and acquired 156 of the stores, transferring them into a new operating company, CAUKI Limited.
That rescue didn’t last. On 26 January 2026 — barely four months after the deal completed — CAUKI Limited itself collapsed into administration, with Kroll’s Philip Dakin, Benjamin Wiles and Janet Burt appointed as joint administrators. Sources close to the situation pointed to a familiar cocktail of pressures: rising costs from government policy changes and increasingly aggressive demands from landlords, which together made the rescued business “unviable” within a matter of months. The company’s UK website stopped trading almost immediately, even as physical stores continued for a time.
The end, when it came, was gradual rather than sudden. Trading continued into the spring as administrators explored options, but by 27 April 2026 all of CAUKI’s remaining standalone stores had closed, with around 1,300 job losses across the two administrations combined. Reports later put the debts owed by the failed CAUKI operation at close to £20 million — a separate figure from, and not to be confused with, the original 2025 insolvency.
The story didn’t end there, though. In May 2026, French entrepreneur Julien Jarjoura acquired the UK naming rights to Claire’s, along with some former executives, around 50 stores and a number of concessions — but not the CAUKI corporate entity, its Irish operations, or the bulk of the remaining stock. Rebranded under Claire’s Europe, the business almost immediately announced ambitions to bring the brand back to the high street at pace, with Jarjoura claiming leases were already being signed for new stores at a rate of several a week from June onward.
Looked at as a whole, the Claire’s saga is a useful illustration of how retail rescues can fail just as spectacularly as the businesses they were meant to save — and of how a brand with genuine consumer recognition can survive multiple corporate deaths, resurfacing under new ownership even as the specific companies that operated it disappear one after another.
