Symbiose has been placed in judicial liquidation

By

Marion Deslandes

Published
Apr 6, 2023

Taken over at the end of 2019 by the French-Turkish group SY, the French women's ready-to-wear brand Sinéquanone tried to modernise the brand last year by renaming itself Symbiose and rejuvenating its style. However, difficulties continued to affect the company, leading to it being placed in receivership in December 2022. At the request of its management, Symbiose was then placed in judicial liquidation on March 24, 2023 by the Paris Commercial Court, due to a lack of future prospects.

Following the same fate as Cop.Copine, San Marina and Redskins, Symbiose is disappearing from the fashion landscape, resulting in the loss of around 75 jobs, 13 shops in France and 16 corners in department stores. "We have been forced to stop the haemorrhage by taking a particularly painful but essential decision to safeguard at least the interests of the staff," said Symbiose's management in a press release, stating that the brand had regained its autonomy a year ago, legally separating from the SY group, which also owns Naf Naf.

According to management, the Covid-19 pandemic that occurred only a few months after the takeover weakened this recovery, as did the rise in costs of energy and other things as well as the growing inflation "which had a heavy impact on the French textile sector in 2022".

The name change carried out last year did not have time to bear fruit. The Sinéquanone brand, "over 50 years old", was "no longer in phase with the demands of a younger and more demanding clientele". And the new name, Symbiose, did not succeed in erasing "the bad image of the Sinéquanone products that has impacted the decisions of the customers," the company observes.

"Unfortunately, the measures we took came too late to compensate for national economic difficulties and to allow households to continue to visit our stores. The costs accumulated over the last three years have obviously become too heavy, even though we had to give ourselves time for the new brand to have an impact on the fashion landscape," the company admits.

With sales of 4.5 million euros in 2021, the Sinéquanone brand was created in the Sentier district of Paris in 1973 under the impetus of Jacques Nataf (also co-founder of Kookaï). It was notably weighed down by an LBO in 2007.