Joe Lycett gives £17k to publishers after retailer’s pre-pack admin deal
Paperchase has been taken to task by comedian and TV presenter Joe Lycett over its administration deal that left greeting card publishers thousands of pounds out of pocket – and he’s even helped three of them with a £17,000 donation.
Introducing Channel 4’s Joe Lycett: Got Your Back special episode screened on Thursday, 15 December, the star told the audience that he’d been “busy pissing people off” as he gets “annoyed about injustice”, and he described the feature as “how goodwill to all men isn’t the policy of a certain greeting card company”.
The main focus of the hour-long show – which can be watched here – was Joe’s takedown of England football legend and previous LGBTQ+ campaigner David Beckham over his work with the World Cup in Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal.
Then, with an intro of “I love a greeting card, it’s as much a part of Christmas as reindeer and mistletoe”, from 18 minutes into the show Joe devoted a 20-minute section to covering the legal move that saved the greeting and stationery retailer and 761 jobs when it was taken over by Aspen Phoenix Newco Ltd, a legal entity of Primera Capital, in January 2021.
But the pre-pack administration deal meant the new owners didn’t have to honour debts with previous suppliers and could legally sell through around £7million worth of stock that the old company hadn’t paid for.
“We have to make clear that this is all entirely legal.” Joe said, “and did keep Paperchase trading. It’s a kick in the post-its to our artists though, who saw their work sold in Paperchase and Aspen Phoenix Newco Ltd has banked the money while they still hadn’t been paid in full.”
He described how the public wouldn’t see anything different as Paperchase is still operating from the same shops, under the same branding, and even the same boss in Oliver Raber, and Joe introduced three artists collectively owed more than £60,000, including Bow & Bell’s Kelly, Angela Chick, who designs and sells cards under her own name, and Liz Faulkner, co-owner of Jelly Armchair, who said the £22,000 outstanding had been “devastating – we’ve been fighting off bankruptcy for a couple of years”.
In a bid to get Paperchase to pay its suppliers – a phrase the retailer has had to block from its Instagram comments after thousands of people had been writing it under its posts – Joe then filmed himself and the artists, including Liz’s sister and co-owner Cat, protesting outside the London Cheapside Paperchase store, along with star potter Keith Brymer-Jones and TV presenter Kinnie Huq and a male model in a dressing gown holding up placards saying “My other card’s a Moonpig” and “Cash for cardmakers” with other potters moulding middle finger signs in clay.
The artists and Joe then moved to Paperchase’s flagship store off Edgeware Road where the model stripped naked with “six pack not pre-pack” written on his back for a mock life-drawing class before they all left as soon as one of the shop’s employees said: “Sorry, I don’t know what this is about, but some of our customers are not really comfortable with it.”
Back in the studio, Joe displayed his own Christmas cards that he designed and sold last month and then handed cards to artists Angela, Liz and Kelly containing cheques dividing the £17,000 raised from the cards’ sale between them.
“I’m giving you guys all the profits to make up for some of the losses you’ve made from your dealings with Paperchase,” Joe added. “It’s a fraction of what our artists are owed, and I’d like to see someone pay up, so we put our concerns to Aspen Phoenix Newco Ltd – we sent them a message in the form of a greeting card wrapped around an extensive legal dossier.”
The retail owner’s statement was: “Aspen acquired the Paperchase brand in January 2021 because they believed in this much-loved High Street brand. As such, they invested money into a business that couldn’t have continued otherwise, and saved 761 jobs in the process.
“They deeply regret that Paperchase’s former owners were unable to pay their creditors, including individual artists and small businesses, and had to hand the business over to the administrators at that time, almost two years ago.”
A seasoned campaigner against injustice, Joe ended the segment by saying: “Just buy direct from the artists everyone!”
Following the broadcast, other publishers affected pushed the issue on social media, with Hole In My Pocket’s Allistair Burt – who has illustrated a special card for Joe and sold it to raise £250 for the comedian’s chosen charity of Arts Emergency – saying: “Thanks to @Joelycett for his show tonight and for highlighting the actions of Paperchase’s owners in 2021 when they put the company in and out of administration overnight.
“While the investment fund owners got to keep all the company assets the administration wiped all £22m worth of their debt, including over £7m to individual designers, including us. We were *fortunate* to only be hit for £7.5k while some of our friends lost over £20k each.
“We all loved working with Paperchase and their original ethos to support new designers. To see what they supposedly stood for swiped away so quickly was disappointing.”
Allistair added that there is currently an investigation under way because there are rules in these situations, and “some of us have engaged companies to ensure all those rules were met”.
Jo Wilson at Dandelion Stationery is £7,000 out of pocket and said: “The way they treated small publishers and other suppliers was shameful and I still find it astounding that it was legal – if I walked into a shop and took goods without paying I’d be called a thief, yet a High Street store can order thousands of pounds of stock, not pay for it and continue to sell it with no comeback. A huge thank you to Joe for his support of small publishers.”
Cath Tate Cards also lost £7,000, and director Rosie Tate told PG Buzz: “For us we can just about swallow it, but the small businesses that went on the show all very nearly went bust because of what Paperchase did. Technically what Paperchase did was legal, but that doesn’t make it right.”
Top: Nude model Franklin features in the artistic protest at Paperchase’s flagship store
