LONDON — Wood Wood, the Danish streetwear retailer, has shuttered its first retail location in the U.K., on Brewer Street in Soho.
Following a prolonged period of end-of-season sales, the interiors of the store were being stripped away as of Friday. Information about the London location has been removed from its website as well.
According to reports in Danish local media, Wood Wood is in the process of a major clean-up to balance the books. Wood Wood’s parent company, Carrington Retail, saw a loss of 32 million Danish krone, or $4.68 million, in 2022 due to “an extraordinary impairment of inventory.”
Prior to the London closure, the retailer shuttered its stores in Berlin and Aarhus, Denmark.
“We are consolidating our retail part, and we are doing so in line with the fact that the market is generally under pressure. Instead, we focus on the parts that are profitable,” Mads Lunøe, who stepped in from Carrington Retail as Wood Wood’s chief executive officer in the fall, told the Danish newspaper Børsen.
First opened in November 2019 right before the COVID-19 pandemic, the London outpost, which carried Wood Wood’s own range of products and a selection of designer brands, was built as a flagship, a showroom, and a creative space for the brand outside of its homeland, where it still operates six points of sale.
Soho, especially Brewer Street, has been an attractive location for fashion retailers since the opening of the concept store Machine-A in 2013. The one-way lane connecting Regent Street and Wardour Street since then has attracted brands like JW Anderson, Heaven by Marc Jacobs, Palace, Fiorucci, Eytys, Natasha Zinko‘s WRHS13, and Stone Island.
The area has also been popular with Scandinavian brands. Within a five-minute walk from Wood Wood are stores for Ganni, Samsøe & Samsøe, Axel Arigato, and Stine Goya. Holzweiler, the Oslo-based label backed by Sequoia China, will open its first U.K. store nearby next year as well.
At the time, Wood Wood cofounder and former creative director Karl Oskar-Olsen said he decided to open a store in London because “the English iconic heritage of clothes and fashion have always been a huge source of inspiration for Wood Wood.”
Coinciding with the retail scaleback, Wood Wood named Nana Aganovic and Brooke Taylor creative directors last summer in a bid to revamp the brand for a global audience.
WWD has reached out to Wood Wood for comment.
