“Dear families, moms, dads, grandmothers… We have endured until the last moment, until our last breath, to press the button and say goodbye. With a heart full of mixed emotions and after many years, we are sad to inform you that Imaginarium is coming to an end.” With an emotional message on his Facebook page, he said goodbye definitively last week to the legendary Imaginarium toy store.
The company that has gone down in collective memory, in addition to its innovative toys and its Kiconico mascot, for the double blue door of its stores, a large one for adults and a small one for children, lost the battle for survival in August of the year past. Its last CEO, Federico Carrillo, did not reach an agreement with banks and suppliers, and the company went bankrupt. The liquidation process is now closed, but the shutters of this toy store of Zaragoza origin began to come down several years ago.
Imaginarium was founded by Félix Tena in 1992 as a value-added multichannel retail company with its own design and brand, specialized in the sale of toys and products for children with a very innovative approach. The model was very successful and opened 420 stores spread across about 20 countries that employed around 800 people. Its turnover exceeded 100 million euros. Venture capital funds such as 3i and L Capital (linked to LVMH) underpinned this growth, which however began to falter in 2008. The economic crisis, together with internal management errors, a meteoric expansion and the fall in corporate spending families, put the company in a complicated situation.
Despite everything, the toy company, determined to boost its international expansion and overcome the slump, went public on the BME Growth in 2009. Imaginarium also expanded its concept and brand far beyond toys. It had cosmetic lines, clothing, a publishing house, a musical show and a travel agency. It manufactured in 30 countries, and more than 500,000 families were members of its club. But at the same time, the debts due to the expansion began to increase, and in 2013 it entered into losses.
Between 2016 and 2017, the company achieved losses of around nine million euros in each year. At the end of 2017, Imaginarium was sold to a group of South American investors, with former Costa Rican Finance Minister Federico Carrillo at the helm, which implied the departure of the founder, Félix Tena.
The group had the intention of refloating the company, but it was not possible. Four years later, in 2021, the general meeting of shareholders announced that the company’s losses were 13 million euros. The following month, the company began negotiating an ERE with the works council for 110 of its around 140 workers, although an agreement was not reached. Then the closure of 95% of its stores began, leaving only those in Zaragoza and Malaga, which have closed between August 2023 and the first quarter of 2024. And what remained, online sales, closed this April 2 .
All that remains, as an irreducible Gallic village, is a store in León that will continue to operate normally with the name Imaginarium and the double blue door that, because it is an associated franchise, can maintain the image. Nostalgic people can make a pilgrimage there, if they wish.
