Hallhuber was rescued in 2021, and two years later the fashion company was insolvent again. This time the rescue was more difficult.
The past few years have been a lot of ups and downs for the Hallhuber fashion house. After numerous changes of ownership, several bankruptcies and interim rescues, the company was insolvent again at the end of May 2023.
The company announced at the time that “multiple crises in the textile retail sector” and the resulting “massive sales losses” were the reason for the renewed insolvency. As a result, Hallhuber started looking for a financial investor for the company with around 110 branches and 1,100 employees.
After the company, founded in 1977, had already changed hands three times, the East Westphalian fashion company Gerry Weber took over in 2015. But the mother from Halle (Westphalia) went bankrupt herself and sold Hallhuber to a fund in 2019. The rescue failed and in 2020 there was a threat of insolvency. Insolvency followed, as a result of which the company had to lay off all employees.
But the Hallhuber company was initially saved and the employees were reemployed in a new company. At that time, investors Rouven Angermann and Torsten Eisenkolb took over. “We left out everything that didn’t make sense. And we learned to keep touching on everything and improving it,” Angermann then told “Textilwirtschaft”.
When Hallhuber finally filed for bankruptcy again in 2023, it meant the final end for the fashion brand. In October 2023, the fashion house closed all of its branches and also the online shop. Former owner and managing director Rouven Angermann told the “Textilwirtschaft” magazine in the fall that there were no offers to continue the company.
Norbert Steinke, who was CEO of Hallhuber until 2017, still had hope until the end. In a post on LinkedIn he finally wrote: “We failed! The following sentence sums it up best: At the beginning there was no money, in the end we ran out of time.”
A few days later, the German Pfandverhandlung auctioned off Ostermayer & Dr. Gold is Hallhuber’s intellectual property. This included the trademark rights for the Hallhuber brand with the sub-brands Donna Hallhuber and Donna by Hallhuber as well as their internet domains. A buyer ultimately offered 1.25 million euros for the trademark rights, and the domains were sold for 230,000 euros.
It is not yet known who the buyer is. According to “Textilwirtschaft” it is the same buyer both times who does not come from the fashion industry. Clothing is now being sold again under the Hallhuber name. The Swiss company Bax, which also owns several media companies and technology companies, has brought a clothing line onto the market with its subsidiary Labaxetta under the name “New Hallhuber”. Apart from the naming rights, the brand no longer has anything to do with the Munich fashion house.