Silverscreen was a British

chain store A chain store or retail chain is a retail outlet in which several locations share a brand, central management and standardized business practices. They have come to dominate the retail and dining markets and many service categories, in many pa ...

brand founded in 2003 in the United Kingdom and focused on films. It was founded by

Ernesto Schmitt Ernesto Gottfried Schmitt (born August 1971) is an American-born serial entrepreneur and investor. He is co-founder of The Craftory, a $600m venture capital fund for cause-driven challenger brands in the consumer goods space. Born in Cinci ...

and

Sebastian James Sebastian Richard Edward Cuthbert James (born 11 March 1966) is a British businessman, who was formerly CEO of Dixons Carphone, and is the current CEO of Boots UK. Early life The son of Christopher James, 5th Baron Northbourne, he was educated ...

. Starting from an initial six stores in 2003, Silverscreen was the United Kingdom's first specialist

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...

high street High Street is a common street name for the primary business street of a city, town, or village, especially in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. It implies that it is the focal point for business, especially shopping. It is also a metonym fo ...

retailer Retail is the sale of goods and Service (economics), services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturing, manufacturers, dire ...

offering an extensive selection of chart and non-chart products (there was also the short lived "Playhouse" subsidiary of

Our Price Our Price was a chain of record stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland from 1971 until 2004. History Founded in 1971 by Gary Nesbitt, Edward Stollins and Mike Isaacs, their first store was located in London's Finchley Road. Until 1976, the ...

which specialised only in videos but this was back in the VHS era). The stores were designed to appeal to film fanatics as much as casual browsers, with all staff required to pass written movie- and TV-knowledge tests before joining. The chain was credited with pioneering the implementation of editorial-led catalogue recommendation in mainstream retail, bringing alive deep archive titles in entertaining hotspots such as "before they were famous", "so bad, they're good", or "the greatest car chases on film".

Administration

After growing to 65 stores, capturing 5% of UK retail and employing over 700 staff, difficult trading conditions led to the business going into

Administration Administration may refer to: Management of organizations * Management, the act of directing people towards accomplishing a goal ** Administrative Assistant, traditionally known as a Secretary, or also known as an administrative officer, admini ...

at the end of March 2006. Silverscreen suffered from high rent due to their prime site locations, and had also been affected by high competition within the UK market from other music chains such as

HMV Sunrise Records and Entertainment, trading as HMV (for His Master's Voice), is a British music and entertainment retailer, currently operating exclusively in the United Kingdom. The first HMV-branded store was opened by the Gramophone Company ...

, supermarket chains such as

Tesco Tesco plc () is a British multinational groceries and general merchandise retailer headquartered in Welwyn Garden City, England. In 2011 it was the third-largest retailer in the world measured by gross revenues and the ninth-largest in th ...

and

Asda Asda Stores Ltd. () (often styled as ASDA) is a British supermarket chain. It is headquartered in Leeds, England. The company was founded in 1949 when the Asquith family merged their retail business with the Associated Dairies company of Yorks ...

; and web sites such as

Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

and

Play.com Rakuten.co.uk is a website owned by Rakuten, that operates as an online marketplace. The website does not sell any products directly, but instead allows third party sellers to sell their products. The website replaced Play.com, which was origin ...

. Having failed to find a buyer for any significant part of the chain, all Silverscreen stores were closed by the end of May, 2006.

References

{{reflist Consumer electronics retailers of the United Kingdom Defunct companies of the United Kingdom Companies that have entered administration in the United Kingdom