The Ayu-textile company won the auction for the sale of the property of the Ozersky Manufactory company, which owns a factory building on 3400 sq. m and production equipment in Ozery near Moscow. This follows from the protocol of the auction published on the website of the Unified Federal Register of Bankruptcy Information. The transaction amount will be 49.8 million rubles.
The manufactory itself, according to SPARK-Interfax, is still owned by the former owner of the Wimm-Bill-Dann holding and the father of designer Kira Plastinina, Sergei Plastinin. The factory was used to produce clothes under the Kira Plastinina brand. The company itself was established back in 2007, and Plastinin, as former CEO of the group Igor Mukhachev reported several years ago, invested at least 3 billion rubles in its promotion.
In its best years (2008-2013), the chain had 279 Kira Plastinina stores in seven countries. Another 56 boutiques in 16 countries operated under the Lublu brand. But the company failed to break even. In 2017, the bankruptcy of the group’s legal entities began, at the same time Plastinina moved to the United States (now she works as vice president of investment management at the Labora financial holding in Dallas, according to her website). Network management in Russia was transferred to local managers, among whom was the former general director of the company Olga Ufimkina. They tried to revive the group’s business by launching sales of new brands – “Kira and I”, Kira Plastinina Mary’s and The Hot Kira Plastinina. But, according to SPARK-Interfax, now of all the legal entities created for these purposes, only one continues to operate – ShP Olesya LLC (Ufimkina owns 90% of the shares in it), this company is a licensee of several trademarks Kira Plastinina.
Ayu-textile is the counterparty of the retailer. The company, which, according to SPARK-Interfax, is owned by the head of the Moscow Academy of Children’s Musical Elena Kirmach, has been gradually buying up the assets of Kira Plastinina for several years. In 2020–2021 she acquired the group’s brands at auction – Kira Plastinina, Kira and I, KP, Kira Plastinina Manufactory and Lublu. Now “Ayu-textile” produces clothes under these trademarks for the group’s regional stores. Now there are 28 Kira Plastinina outlets in various cities of Russia (only one of them is in Moscow). They are managed by the Trend Style company, its owner is Alexei Zdornov, the former owner of Ayu-textile. It was not possible to get comments from the representative of the latter company.
The purchase of the factory building in Ozyory is obviously necessary for the Ayu-Tekstil company to increase the production of clothing, Anna Savenko, retail real estate consultant, believes. Earlier, Anatoly Trifonov, top manager of Kira Plastinina, said that the company’s capacity allows “to produce 140,000 knitwear and 250,000 textile products per year.” It is not known how much Ayu-textile is currently producing. In addition, the presence of such a manufactory makes it possible to solve the problem of the workload of the current production of Ayu-Textile against the backdrop of an increase in orders.
Restarting the network in the conditions that are currently developing in the retail real estate market looks logical, say experts interviewed by Vedomosti. For example, Irina Tsarkova, director of the retail real estate department at Nikoliers, notes that activity on the part of Russian retailers has increased markedly after the departure of foreign players, so this decision seems natural and logical to her. Mikhail Burmistrov, General Director of Infoline-analytics, also speaks about this, adding that the share of vacant premises in the retail real estate market has grown significantly over the past year, so domestic clothing players have good potential for development. Goods of Russian brands in the middle price segment have become very popular, so investments in such projects are highly justified, Savenko agrees. Moreover, the Kira Plastinina brand, according to her, is known to the Russian buyer. Nevertheless, the management company now faces the difficult task of winning a new audience, Burmistrov argues. According to him, in some cases, when a brand has a certain concept that does not correspond to the realities of the market today, it is easier to launch a new brand than to breathe life into an old one.
