M&Co is closing 26 more stores this weekend – check if your local branch is affected

Scottish fashion retailer M&Co will close 24 of its stores across the UK today and a further two tomorrow.

It comes after the company announced it would be closing all of its 170 stores in February after falling into administration twice within two years.

Among the stores set to close this weekend include those in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, Newport, Wales, and St Andrews, Scotland.

The brand was bought be Peterborough-based AK Retail Holdings, the parent company of Yours Clothing, Long Tall Sally and Bump It Up Maternity but the deal did not include the physical stores.

Among the stores set to close this weekend include those in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, Newport, Wales, and St Andrews, Scotland

M&Co, which traded online as well as via a large network of stores, called in administrators from the advisory firm Teneo in December last year.

The firm said M&Co had experienced ‘a sharp rise in its input costs’ which had led to the collapse of ‘consumer confidence’ and ‘trading challenges’.

In 2020, the company closed 47 shops in as part of an administration deal that cost 400 jobs out of a total workforce at the time of about 2,600.

The recent closure of its physical stores is expected to see around 1,900 job losses.

M&Co was founded as Mackays, a pawnbrokers, in Paisley, Renfrewshire, in 1834.

It switched to selling clothes in the 1950s under brothers Len and Iain McGeoch.

In 2005, the company began rebranding its stores as M&Co, which completed in 2020.

The closures follow a string of post-Covid high street collapses like Paperchase, Debenhams, Monsoon and the Arcadia Group.

Stationery giant Paperchase went into administration in January this year and its brand was purchased by Tesco – leaving its stores and hundreds of staff at risk of closure and redundancy.