dELiA*s - Fashion Company Profile

Company Profile

Everything about the brand sits on this one page: the catalog-era record, the December 2014 Chapter 11 filing and the Dolls Kill revival. Because the revived line is a licensing relaunch rather than the old public company, the figures in the historical record below belong to their period and are dated as such.

That three-channel structure - website, catalog, mall stores - is the profile's defining business fact, and it dates the filing precisely. A teen brand selling simultaneously online, by direct mail catalog and in malls was the omni-channel model of its era, built for a customer who shopped all three. The news lines sit above the business description, in the order the directory added them: an April 14, 2015 update reporting that dELiA*s may be back for back-to-school 2015, and the December 2014 news of the Chapter 11 filing, detailed in the next section. Both Apparel Search blog reports are linked from this page, as the directory(?:'|')s own continuing record of the story.

The December 2014 Chapter 11 Filing

The filing is recorded in formal language, kept here in substance: dELiA*s, Inc., an omni-channel retail company primarily marketing to teenage girls, announced on December 8, 2014 that it, along with certain of its subsidiaries, had filed voluntary petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in White Plains, NY, on December 7, 2014. The company would continue to manage its properties and operate its businesses as debtors-in-possession under the jurisdiction of the Bankruptcy Court and in accordance with the Bankruptcy Code and the court's orders.

The liquidation arrangement is recorded with the same care: the company entered into an agency agreement with Hilco Merchant Resources, LLC and Gordon Brothers Retail Partners, LLC to, among other things, liquidate all merchandise owned by the company and dispose of certain furnishings, trade fixtures, equipment and improvements to real property with respect to the company's stores. An earlier restructuring step is also on the record: in June 2013 it sold its Alloy business to HRSH Acquisitions LLC, doing business as Alloy Apparel and Accessories. Read together, the sequence is a teen retailer shedding a sister business in 2013, filing Chapter 11 at the end of 2014 with a store liquidation under way, and then - per the April 2015 update - a reported return in time for back-to-school 2015.