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Card Factory
Card Factory is a retailer of greeting cards and gifts in the United Kingdom founded in Wakefield by Dean Hoyle and his wife Janet. The first store opened in 1997, and by 2020 the company had over 1,000 stores. The company also operates two retail websites and has mobile apps for both iPhone and Android. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange. History Origins to 2009 Dean Hoyle left school with no qualifications, having a self confessed greater interest in football. With his wife Janet, from 1993 they began buying cards wholesale, and selling them from the back of their van at car boot sales and public open air events. In 1997, they opened their first shop under within the holding company Sportswift Ltd, purposefully choosing secondary retail locations which were cheaper. After opening a few stores, whilst Janet founded and headed up the internal design and print function, Dean concentrated on expanding the business, with a nominal target of 500 retail outlets. This gave ...
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Public Company
A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) company can be listed on a stock exchange (listed company), which facilitates the trade of shares, or not (unlisted public company). In some jurisdictions, public companies over a certain size must be listed on an exchange. In most cases, public companies are ''private'' enterprises in the ''private'' sector, and "public" emphasizes their reporting and trading on the public markets. Public companies are formed within the legal systems of particular states, and therefore have associations and formal designations which are distinct and separate in the polity in which they reside. In the United States, for example, a public company is usually a type of corporation (though a corporation need not be a public company), in the United Kingdom it is usually a public limited company (plc), i ...
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Car Boot Sale
Car boot sales or boot fairs are a form of market in which private individuals come together to sell household and garden goods. They are popular in the United Kingdom, where they are often referred to simply as 'car boots'. Some scientific research has studied people's shopping habits at car boot sales. These groups of scientists see the rotation of surplus household stock as essential as it prevents waste and disposal costs, and also produces a small community where thriftiness and entrepreneurship flourish. The term "car boot sale" refers to the selling of items from a car's boot. Although a small proportion of sellers are professional traders selling goods, or indeed browsing for items to buy, most of the goods on sale are used personal possessions. Car boot sales are a way of attracting a large group of people in one place to recycle useful but unwanted domestic items that otherwise might have been thrown away. Car boot sales generally take place in the summer months. Ho ...
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Matalan
Matalan is a British fashion and homeware retailer based in Knowsley, Merseyside. It was established by John Hargreaves in 1985, and is still owned by the Hargreaves family. , the company employed over 13,000, and had 230 stores in the United Kingdom, together with franchise stores in the Middle East. History John Hargreaves opened the first Matalan store in 1985 at Bamber Bridge, near Preston, Lancashire. There were fifty stores by 1995, and in 1997, the company moved its headquarters from Preston to Skelmersdale, also in Lancashire. The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1998, but taken private again by the Hargreaves family in October 2006. During 2009, John Hargreaves sought to sell off Matalan, but by February 2010, had failed to find buyers willing to meet the £1.5 billion price. Jason Hargreaves was appointed managing director in July 2013. The headquarters moved to a purpose built site at Knowsley, Merseyside in 2014. The company won approval for th ...
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Aldi
Aldi (stylised as ALDI) is the common company brand name of two German multinational family-owned discount supermarket chains operating over 10,000 stores in 20 countries. The chain was founded by brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht in 1946, when they took over their mother's store in Essen. The business was split into two separate groups in 1960, that later became Aldi Nord, headquartered in Essen, and Aldi Süd, headquartered in Mülheim. In 1962, they introduced the name Aldi (a syllabic abbreviation for Albrecht Diskont), which is pronounced . In Germany, Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd have been financially and legally separate since 1966, although both divisions' names may appear as if they were a single enterprise with certain store brands or when negotiating with contractor companies. The formal business name of Aldi Nord is Aldi Einkauf GmbH & Co., while the formal business name of Aldi Süd is ALDI SÜD Dienstleistungs-SE & Co. Each company is owned and operated independently, ...
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Initial Public Offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment banks, who also arrange for the shares to be listed on one or more stock exchanges. Through this process, colloquially known as ''floating'', or ''going public'', a privately held company is transformed into a public company. Initial public offerings can be used to raise new equity capital for companies, to monetize the investments of private shareholders such as company founders or private equity investors, and to enable easy trading of existing holdings or future capital raising by becoming publicly traded. After the IPO, shares are traded freely in the open market at what is known as the free float. Stock exchanges stipulate a minimum free float both in absolute terms (the total value as determined by the share price multiplied by the ...
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Huddersfield Town F
Huddersfield is a market town in the Kirklees district in West Yorkshire, England. It is the administrative centre and largest settlement in the Kirklees district. The town is in the foothills of the Pennines. The River Holme's confluence into the similar-sized Colne to the south of the town centre which then flows into the Calder in the north eastern outskirts of the town. The rivers around the town provided soft water required for textile treatment in large weaving sheds, this made it a prominent mill town with an economic boom in the early part of the Victorian era Industrial Revolution. The town centre has much neoclassical Victorian architecture, one example is which is a Grade I listed building – described by John Betjeman as "the most splendid station façade in England" – and won the Europa Nostra award for architecture. It hosts the University of Huddersfield and three colleges: Greenhead College, Kirklees College and Huddersfield New College. The town i ...
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Charterhouse Capital Partners
Charterhouse Capital Partners is a London based private equity investment firm focused on investing in European mid-market companies valued between €200m and €1.5bn. The company targets investments across the services, healthcare, specialised industrials and consumer sectors. History Founded in 1934, Charterhouse Capital Partners is one of Europe’s oldest private equity firms. The firm's predecessors, then a division of Charterhouse Bank, began raising third party equity in 1976. In June 2001, the firm's management completed a management buyout from HSBC to become an independent investment firm. Notable investment activity In 2009, Charterhouse acquired Wood Mackenzie, selling its stake to Hellman & Friedman in 2012. In 2010, the company acquired Deb Group, a skincare product group, and sold its stake in 2015 to SC Johnson, reportedly earning a return of over 2.5x. In 2010, they acquired Card Factory, exiting its stake in 2015. In 2011, the company acquired ERM, ...
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Celebrations Group
Celebrations Group was a chain of British greeting cards stores. Most of their stores traded under the names of Cardfair and Card Warehouse. Celebrations Group was formed in 2006, when it purchased part of the Greeting Card Group from administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers. The company The company had 288 stores across the United Kingdom and employed around 1800 staff. It had a head office and distribution centre at Orton Southgate in Peterborough. Celebrations Group also fully owned the transactional website Calendar Factory. The company was formed in July 2006 following the dissolution of the Greeting Card Group Ltd which was itself an amalgamation of the Card Fair and Card Warehouse brands which had existed since the early 1990s as separate companies. Both brands were maintained following the acquisition of Card Warehouse by Card Fair in May 2003, with some towns having two stores on the same high street. This remained the case for a short time after Celebrations Group acquired ...
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Greetings Card
A greeting card is a piece of card stock, usually with an illustration or photo, made of high quality paper featuring an expression of friendship or other sentiment. Although greeting cards are usually given on special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas or other holidays, such as Halloween, they are also sent to convey thanks or express other feelings (such as condolences or best wishes to get well from illness). Greeting cards are usually packaged with an envelope and come in a variety of styles. There are both mass-produced and handmade versions available and they may be distributed by hundreds of companies large and small. While typically inexpensive, more elaborate cards with die-cuts, pop-ups, sound elements or glued-on decorations may be more expensive. Hallmark Cards and American Greetings, both U.S.-based companies, are the two largest producers of greeting cards in the world today. In Western countries and increasingly in other societies, many people tradition ...
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PricewaterhouseCoopers
PricewaterhouseCoopers is an international professional services brand of firms, operating as partnerships under the PwC brand. It is the second-largest professional services network in the world and is considered one of the Big Four accounting firms, along with Deloitte, EY and KPMG. PwC firms are in 157 countries, across 742 locations, with 284,000 people. As of 2019, 26% of the workforce was based in the Americas, 26% in Asia, 32% in Western Europe and 5% in Middle East and Africa. The company's global revenues were $42.4 billion in FY 2019, of which $17.4 billion was generated by its Assurance practice, $10.7 billion by its Tax and Legal practice and $14.4 billion by its Advisory practice. The firm in its recent actual form was created in 1998 by a merger between two accounting firms: Coopers & Lybrand, and Price Waterhouse. Both firms had histories dating back to the 19th century. The trading name was shortened to PwC (stylized p''w''c) in September 2010 as part of a rebr ...
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Grant Thornton
Grant Thornton is the world's seventh-largest by revenue and sixth-largest by number of employees professional services network of independent accounting and consulting member firms which provide assurance, tax and advisory services to privately held businesses, public interest entities, and public sector entities. Grant Thornton International Ltd. is a not-for-profit, non-practising, international umbrella membership entity organised as a private company limited by guarantee. Grant Thornton International Ltd. is incorporated in London, England, and has no share capital. According to Grant Thornton International Ltd., member firms within the global organisation operate in over 130 countries employing over 56,000 personnel for a combined global revenue of US$6.6 billion. History 20th century The earliest origins of the name date back to 1904, when the UK firm of Thornton and Thornton was formed in Oxford. Through a series of name changes this firm merged in 1959 with an ...
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Maplin Electronics
Maplin Electronics is the trading name of an online retailer of electronic goods in the United Kingdom and Ireland launched in 2019, using the brand of the former company Maplin Electronics Ltd., which operated from 1972 to 2018. The original Maplin company operated many retail shops and an extensive mail order service, online and by telephone; in June 2017, there were 217 Maplin stores. On 28 February 2018, Maplin went into administration and all stores permanently ceased trading in June that year. The brand of Maplin was acquired by a new company, Maplin Online Ltd., on 31 May 2019, later renamed Digital First Retail Ltd., still trading as Maplin. The new company sells similar products to Maplin Electronics Ltd, using the Maplin website, branding and trading name. No physical Maplin shops have been opened, and the legal obligations of Maplin Electronics Ltd, such as warranty support, were not assumed. History Founding Maplin Electronic Supplies was established in 1972 as a ...
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