Lakeland Leather is profitable — so it liquidated its own stores

Lakeland Leather is a Cumbrian retailer of leather goods and accessories, its shops spread across the tourist towns and cities of the north — Keswick, Bowness and Ambleside in the Lakes, plus Carlisle, Gretna, Kendal, Chester, Southport, York and Northallerton among them. The Kendal shop alone had been trading for 43 years. The stores ran through a subsidiary, Felldale Retail Limited, under the brand owner Lakeland Fashion Limited.

On 2 March 2026 Felldale announced the closure of three stores — Carlisle, whose lease had expired, plus Gretna and Kendal — citing a challenging trading environment, with rising costs and lower footfall continuing to hit parts of the high street. Staff were consulted, and the company hoped some would relocate to the Lake District shops. Crucially, the group said Lakeland Leather remained profitable: sales had grown more than 7 per cent the previous year, and digital was now the larger part of the business, with a third successive year of online growth above 20 per cent.

The retreat widened. By May 2026 seven stores had closed — Kendal, Carlisle, Gretna, Chester, Southport, York and Northallerton — and Lakeland Fashion placed Felldale Retail into liquidation, describing it as an orderly wind-up relating solely to the legacy store portfolio. The remaining twelve stores passed to trading directly under Lakeland Fashion.

The shape of the case is not collapse but amputation: a profitable brand whose online channel had overtaken the tills cut its high-street arm off and let a liquidator tidy the leases. The name kept trading; the addresses paid.