The granddaughter of the founder of Wilko has said the chain’s management team and staff tried everything they could to revive the struggling discount retailer before it collapsed into administration earlier this month.
Speaking to The Times, Lisa Wilkinson said: “Everybody has thrown everything and everything again at trying to make Wilko a success.
“The team members, the suppliers, the landlords . . . everybody has thrown their soul and heart at it — and if I get tearful, that’s how I feel, because people have worked really bloody hard, round the clock, to keep this thing going.
“If it couldn’t be kept going it’s because it couldn’t be kept going,” she told the publication.
Wilko plunged into administration at the beginning of August after several months of teetering on the edge of collapse.
The value retailer fell behind while rival chains including B&M, Poundland and The Range found success amid the cost-of-living crisis.
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However, Wilkinson claims Wilko’s demise was down to lots of little mistakes instead of larger factors.
She said: “When people are looking at how this happened, they want it to be a single big thing that was seismic, and it wasn’t.
“It’s a whole load of things that have just added up to a seismic thing over time and which mean we have ended up in the place where we’ve ended up, which is a very sad place.”
The retailer plummeted to a £36.8m pre-tax loss in the year to January 2022 after sales over the period slipped 3% to £1.3bn. It paid £3m dividends to the family the same year.
Despite racking up significant losses, Wilkinson told The Times that Wilko still had more than £100m in assets and £58m in cash.
“Hindsight is a great bedfellow and I like to think we did all the things we should do when we paid dividends.
“The board checked that we’d got profits or reserved profits, there was sufficient cash, we went through the right governance, the auditors checked it off.
“Is there a bit of me lying awake at night saying I wish we’d never taken a penny of dividends out? It might have made us survive a couple of months longer,” she said, adding that it “really wouldn’t have made a difference”.
Administrators at PwC are facing mounting pressure to accept one of the several rescue bids received for Wilko after private equity firm M2 Capital submitted a last-minute offer understood to be worth £90m.
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