Charles Clinkard mulls store closures as brand pivots to ecommerce focus

Speaking exclusively with Retail Week, Charles Clinkard managing director Tim Payne said that because of persistently low consumer confidence and the volatile economic landscape, the retailer is refreshing its strategy by accelerating its progression towards a “seamless, service-focused shopping experience for all of its customers”. 

He said that the retailer will invest heavily in its ecommerce platform throughout 2026 to increase online traffic and build a “proposition that remains built on quality customer service, fully transitioning its service-led values into the digital world”. 

“The reality for us, being very blunt, is that stores are tough at the moment and ecommerce is okay,” said Payne. “I think that’s the same with most retailers.”

Payne says that operating stores is “very much a fixed-operating model” with rents and rates and staffing hours, while ecommerce offers the brand more flexibility on everything from staffing costs to marketing spend. 

“When you take into account all of the added costs, we’ve gone from a position where we had 25 profitable stores to only having 15 profitable stores,” Payne said. “But we can’t just drop that level of business, for obvious reasons. The main one is our discounts with our suppliers. We get very good discounts because of the level of business we do with certain suppliers.”

Because of this, Payne insisted there won’t be “mass store closures”, but conceded that he is looking at the 10 unprofitable stores in the estate “on a case-by-case basis as leases expire” as to whether to renew them or not. 

Is Charles Clinkard on the way to becoming a pureplay footwear retailer? “No,” Payne said. “We definitely need those foundational stores. We have 15 stores that are delivering reasonable profitability, and 10 of those are very profitable. So even if we continue to struggle for the next couple of years, we would still have 10 very profitable stores in the estate”. 

In terms of potential job losses as a result, Payne says the business will do everything it can to keep those to a minimum. He also says that rather than slash jobs at the head office, the retailer instead has imposed a hiring freeze. “We’re not replacing people who are leaving the business at the moment,” he says, “to keep some of those costs down”. 

Despite all this, Payne said Charles Clinkard isn’t “laden down with debt” and, as a result, is not exploring any restructuring or insolvency practices.