March 24, 2026
Clothes discounter KiK plans wave of store closures after excessive expansion
KiK’s Chief Financial Officer Christian Kümmel has told the dpa news agency that the German textile discounter plans to close around 300 stores across Europe this year. This follows an aggressive expansion strategy that Kümmel said had proven inefficient.
“We are trimming our portfolio to improve profitability,” he said. “The formula of, ‘We’ll open five stores and have five times as many customers,’ did not prove 100% successful.”
He said that in some of the most egregious cases, Kik had opened up stores within just 1 kilometer (roughly 0.6 miles) of each other.
“We have expanded too densely,” he said. “We’re paring it back.”
Kümmel said KiK would reduce its number of stores across Europe by about 225, closing roughly 300 and opening another 75. In its biggest market, Germany, KiK plans to close roughly 135 stores, leaving around 2,200.
The CFO said it was not yet possible to list which stores would close, in part because of the need to notify employees first. However, he said he did not anticipate layoffs from the chain’s workforce of around 32,000 people, 19,000 of them in Germany.
“We will employ staff in the stores that are closing in other branches, or find some other solution,” he said.
KiK is an abbreviation of the German phrase “Kunde ist König,” or “the customer is king.”