Sears’ bankruptcy has burned thousands of vendors worldwide
If you think shopping at Sears can be sad these days, it’s nothing compared to doing business with the struggling chain.
Michelle Chan — whose Hong Kong-based company Mien Co. Ltd. manufactures handbags, wallets and belts for brands like Joe Boxer and Jaclyn Smith — says she lost her life savings when Sears filed for bankruptcy last October.
The long-dreaded Chapter 11, which came after seasons of increasingly spotty shelves at Sears and Kmart stores, left Chan’s company on the hook for a whopping $4.2 million, as Sears rejected bills for several months’ worth of inventory she’d already shipped.
To stay afloat, 51-year-old Chan, a Sears vendor for the past 12 years, has been forced to borrow from relatives, liquidate her retirement savings and take out high-interest bank loans pledging her home as collateral.
“Mien is not a big company like Samsung [or] Whirlpool,” Chan told The Post in a series of e-mails. “Being owed such a big amount of non-paid invoices is a serious attack.”
Chan, who says she was recently admitted to a hospital for clinical depression and has entertained s--c-dal thoughts, is among thousands of vendors in the US and abroad who face uncertain futures after getting burned in one of the largest retail bankruptcies ever filed in the US.
Suppliers have been caught between the bankrupt retailer and Eddie Lampert, whose hedge fund ESL has created a new company called Transform Holdco to operate 400-plus surviving Sears stores.
“Each [is] pointing a finger at the other about who should pay what” to creditors, according to Joseph Saracheck, a lawyer who represents a half-dozen vendors in the Sears case, including Chan.
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But the fact that so many got burned is also proof of the dire state of manufacturing worldwide, the lawyer notes.
“It was the most vulnerable vendors who sold to Sears,” Saracheck told The Post. “It reflected an unhealthy manufacturing sector. If everything was great, you wouldn’t sell [to] Sears, because you saw the writing on the wall.”
One China-based maker of women’s and children’s clothing told The Post he’s still doing business with Sears despite being owed nearly $1 million because Sears is his second-largest account. The company’s owner, who asked that his name not be used, speculated that Sears likely doesn’t have many garment factories still willing to work with it.
“It was a hard time because we were not paid for what we shipped, and we had already purchased different fabrics and begun manufacturing,” the company’s owner said. The pile of unpaid invoices “adds pressure on our business,” he added.
At a court hearing last month, it was revealed that Lampert’s Transform Holdco was trying to wriggle out of paying as much as $139 million in vendor debts it assumed when it bought Sears out of bankruptcy for $5.2 billion in February. The sum was to cover vendors who had shipped Sears goods as much as 20 days before the filing, entitling them to full repayment under bankruptcy laws.
Chan had hoped the hearing would clear the way for her to receive immediate payment for at least $14,000 worth of goods. But the court didn’t approve it. In the meantime, she’s bracing for threats from her own creditors at home.
“They will retain some illegal loan collection agent to come to our place to threaten our company or they will sue us,” Chan predicted. “Sears … need[s] to pay me or otherwise I personally and my business will fall into a serious crisis.”
A Lampert rep referred a call to a Sears rep, who didn’t respond to requests for comment.
https://nypost.com/2019/06/02/sears-bankruptcy-has-burned-thousands-of-vendors-worldwide/amp/