Under Offer
Hilco Streambank (“Hilco”) is seeking offers to acquire the intellectual property assets of The Direct Office Supply Company Limited (In Liquidation) (“Direct Office Supply” or the “Company”) on behalf of the Liquidator of the Company, Steven Wright of William Duncan (Business Recovery) Limited.
Founded in 2003, Direct Office Supply was a leading office and home office furniture supplier to businesses, individuals, and government organisations. With over 25,000 products, the Company offers one of the largest ranges of home and office products available online in the UK.
Recognising the decline of the traditional brick-and-mortar stores, Direct Office Supply operated exclusively via its popular online proprietary platform (the “Platform”). Using clever technology, the Company’s Platform connects consumers directly with the biggest brands, allowing customers to browse an extensive range of products quickly, easily, and from anywhere, giving customers the best choice at modest prices.
The Company’s extensive product range includes Office Chairs, Office Desks, Filing Cabinets, Safes, Storage Cupboards and more. Direct Office Supply’s Platform stocks leading-brand home and office supplies from the likes of design-led UK-based furniture brand Dams, market-leading manufacturer of audio-visual furniture and accessories Alphason Designs, renowned steel office furniture manufacturer Silverline, and market-leading office furniture and supplies brand TC Group.
The Direct Office Supply brand and e-commerce Platform are the product of significant investment, with the Company having invested over £80k in building the Platform. Since its launch, the Platform has handled more than 3.7k transactions, converting to over £1.1m in revenues without impacting website performance. Between September 2021 and July 2022, the website attracted over 293k users, c. 97.4k of whom came direct to the website, with over 358.7k individual sessions, showing the Platform’s robust performance and excellent traction.
Prior to its Liquidation, the Company operated a drop-ship-based business model, reducing the Company’s operational costs and risk, a model available to the prospective purchaser of the Platform.
Via its Platform, the Company previously serviced a diverse and loyal customer base of c. 60k businesses and the general public, with an extensive customer and email subscriber database available to acquire. In addition to its vast customer base, the Company managed a robust supplier network of many reputable companies and industry-leading brands, with the database of the Company’s key suppliers also available to purchase.
This acquisition opportunity offers a savvy buyer the unique opportunity to acquire a previously c. £1.1m revenue-generating and elegantly designed e-commerce Platform with a tested, scalable and low-overhead tech infrastructure tailored perfectly to the home and office supplies sector, an established and loyal customer base and well-known brand to pick up where the Company left off.
The Direct Office Supply brand is well-known and highly regarded, particularly across the UK.
The Direct Office Supply brand embodies the Company’s vision of offering a quality range of home and office products from industry-leading manufacturers direct to organisations and the public at affordable prices.
The brand has been bolstered by its excellent relationships with and support of some of the UK’s most renowned furniture and equipment manufacturers and brands.
The brand and Direct Office Supply website established a loyal customer following, illustrated by its excellent web presence and 4/5 star Trustpilot rating.
The Company will likely possess rights in the unregistered trade marks protecting the “Direct Office Supply” brand name and logo.
The Company holds the primary, high-traffic directofficesupply.co.uk domain name, which hosted the Company’s intelligent e-commerce Platform.
The Company owns the copyright in the content of the sleek directofficesupply.co.uk e-commerce website, which was directly linked to revenues.
Directofficesupply.co.uk is a unique, disruptive tech platform tailored to the unique challenges of selling office furniture and homewares online.
The Platform is a state-of-the-art e-commerce website based on the Magento platform. In addition to its elegant design, the Platform is built with a unique internal framework optimised for maximum device compliance, fast page load times, Core Web Vitals compliance, user experience and high conversion rates. The Platform also sits on a secure, auto-scaling Sonassi PaaS stack with PCI-DSS ASV scans and a Cloudflare CDN/WAF for added speed improvements.
Ensuring seamless navigation, the Company’s Platform was built by migrating all products, attributes, images, categories and product/category assignments and other pages from Direct Office Supplies’ legacy site, ensuring ease of use and adoption by the Company’s loyal customer base.
Often, transferring from one site to another can adversely impact a business’ SEO footprint, though Direct Office Supply’s migration went flawlessly, with no detectable dip in SEO or sales other than the usual seasonal traffic.
Direct Office Supply had over 90% automation across all marketing channels, platforms and integrations, avoiding needing a dedicated (and potentially expensive) in-house marketing team, another benefit to the Platform.
Other attractive features of the Platform include its B2B functionality, allowing for multi-buy discounts, B2B customer group pricing, dropship automation and pay-with-purchase order functionality. Checking out orders is also straightforward and convenient and offers full integration with Braintree, ApplePay, GooglePay, AmazonPay, PayPal and Klarna.
Between September 2021 and July 2022, the website attracted over 293k users. A high proportion of the traffic to the website is organic or direct, with a significant portion of the visitors also driven by digital marketing activity. For the same period, the Company’s e-commerce website channel facilitated c. 3.7k transactions and generated revenue of c. £1.1m.
The Company has a vast customer database containing c. 60k customer records. Email marketing was a key focus for the Company, with special offers frequently sent to customers, further enhancing engagement.
The Company holds a well-recorded database of its key suppliers, with whom it has established strong relationships, which are available to pick up.
The Company’s branded Trustpilot account is also available to acquire, where the Company holds a 4/5 star rating based on over 750 reviews.
Under Offer
All expressions of interest and bids are to be directed to Hilco in writing. A Bid Submission Form is available on request. Please contact Hilco to gain access to a virtual data room of further information on signing a confidentiality agreement.
The Liquidator acts as an agent of the Company and without personal liability.
The bidder acknowledges that Hilco acts as an agent for the Liquidator who offers for sale only what right, title and interest (if any) the Company possesses in the assets. Such sale will be without any warranties, expressed or implied. The information provided has not been verified by Hilco or the Liquidator and bidders are deemed to have carried out their own due diligence.
VAT, if applicable, at 20% will be added to the price. A non-refundable deposit of 20% will be payable by the buyer within 48 hours of bid acceptance. A buyer’s premium of 10% of the sale price is payable by the winning bidder. Legal completion to occur within 5 business days of bid acceptance. Hilco’s full Terms and Conditions apply.
