Kitchen and bedroom furniture supplier Waterline was unable to secure investment ahead of its collapse.
Alex Cadwallader and Dane O’Hara, both of Leonard Curtis, were appointed as joint administrators of Waterline Limited on 9 October 2025.
In the build up to its administration, the Company had been adversely affected in recent years by inflation and interest rates which has reduced household budgets and therefore activity levels in the Company’s sector.
The Company has recently been loss-making, recording losses before tax of £2.08m and £5.14m for the financial years ended 31 March 2024 and 31 March 2025, based on filed and management accounts.
The Company was unable to meet its trade creditor liabilities and, having exceeded credit terms, the Company’s credit insurers marked them down as “credit stop”. Given this position the Company ceased making orders for supplies.
Immediately prior to Leonard Curtis’s instruction, the directors were attempting to conclude an investment into the Company and had engaged exclusively with a Private Equity (PE) firm in this regard. However, on 22 September 2025, the directors were advised that the PE firm could no longer proceed with any such investment.
The Joint Administrators understood that parent company Crown was not in a position to provide any further funding, and the Company had exhausted any realistic sources of further working capital sufficient to trade the business as a going concern in the medium to long term.
The Joint Administrators advised the directors that the Company was then insolvent, by way of statutory definition, as it was unable to meet its labilities as and when they fall due. It initiated an accelerated mergers & acquisitions (AMA).
Despite some expressions of interest being received in certain assets of the company – mainly stock and intellectual property rights – the administrator stated there was no appetite for purchasing the business as a going concern.
This led the appointment of administrators, which saw 105 jobs lost with 15 staff members working to support the wind down of the business.
With regards to creditors, preferential employee claims stood at £12,400, while the HMRC is owed £358,000. These are expected to be repaid from realised assets valuing £4.2m. However, there is also a secured debt owed to its parent company to sum of £5.4m. Unsecured creditor claims totalled £3.4m and included £994,000 owed to staff redundancy as well as another sum of £919,000. It is expected that creditors will suffer a shortfall of £2.8m.
