HEMA, Blokker and the Long Decline of the Dutch High Street

The Dutch high street did not decline because people stopped shopping; it declined because the chains that anchored it were owned by the wrong people with the wrong balance sheets. V&D belonged to an American private-equity firm that stopped funding losses. Blokker belonged to a family that walked away and then to a serial retail investor who could not stop the bleeding. HEMA was bought in 2007 for €1.3 billion with borrowed money and spent thirteen years paying for it. This article traces the three collapses, explains what the 2025–2026 revival of HEMA and Blokker under new owners tells us about retail economics, and puts the whole story in the context of Dutch city centres that have shed 26% of their shops since 2005. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

What did the Dutch high street look like before the collapses?

Until the mid-2010s almost every Dutch town centre of any size had the same four anchors, a V&D department store, a HEMA, a Blokker and an Albert Heijn or Jumbo supermarket, a uniformity that made the Netherlands one of the most chain-dominated retail landscapes in Europe and left city centres exposed when three of the four anchors failed or shrank.

Vroom & Dreesmann was founded in 1887 in Amsterdam by Willem Vroom and Anton Dreesmann and expanded until the 1970s into a national chain of department stores with La Place self-service restaurants attached. HEMA, the Hollandsche Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam, was founded in Amsterdam in 1926 by the owners of De Bijenkorf as a fixed-price variety store, the Dutch answer to Woolworths, and from the 1999 merger of Vendex and KBB the two chains sat under the same roof as V&D. Blokker was founded on 25 April 1896 in Hoorn by Jacob Blokker and his wife Saapke Kuiper as a hardware shop and grew into the country’s largest household-goods chain, with more than 800 stores across the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Suriname by 2015 when its holding company also owned Intertoys, Xenos, Marskramer and Leen Bakker.

What the three had in common was a formula built for an era of weekly town-centre shopping trips and limited competition: large, prominently located stores, broad assortments, and prices that were reasonable rather than cheap. From about 2005 onwards that formula met three challenges at once, as Action’s discount stores spread through retail parks, bol and later Amazon took over the home-goods and gifts categories online, and private-equity owners demanded returns the formula could not generate.

Why did V&D go bankrupt in 2015?

V&D went bankrupt on 31 December 2015 because it had not made a profit since 2010, lost €49 million in 2014 on sales of €604 million, and its owner Sun Capital Partners, which had bought it from KKR in 2010, finally declined to cover a liquidity shortfall after a warm November and December hit winter-clothing sales.

The department-store format had been in trouble since the 2004 buy-out of Vendex KBB by a consortium including KKR, AlpInvest and Permira, which renamed the group Maxeda and sold its parts, including HEMA to Lion Capital in 2007 and V&D to Sun Capital. V&D’s 62 stores occupied the largest and most expensive buildings in each city, often owned by the chain’s former parent and leased back at high rents. Attempts to cut costs ran into Dutch labour law: a court rejected a 5.8% wage cut in 2015, although the company did shed 400 jobs and forced landlords to accept lower rents.

When the bankruptcy came, about 10,300 employees lost their jobs and the state benefits agency UWV paid their salaries into January 2016. Jumbo bought the La Place restaurant chain, about 60 to 65 outlets, in January 2016, as described in the Jumbo and Van Eerd family story. The Canadian retailer Hudson’s Bay took over up to 20 of V&D’s former buildings in 2017 without buying the company, opened Dutch department stores under its own name, and announced in August 2019 that all 15 remaining stores would close by the end of that year. Most of the former V&D buildings have since been split into smaller shops, offices, hotels or apartments.

How did HEMA end up with €750 million of debt?

HEMA ended up with about €750 million of debt because Lion Capital paid €1.3 billion for it in 2007 and financed much of the price with high-yield bonds secured on the company, a structure that assumed sales growth that never came and left HEMA paying tens of millions of euros a year in interest instead of investing in stores.

For a decade HEMA was a good business trapped in a bad capital structure. Its roughly 750 stores, about 250 of them run by independent franchisees who accounted for around 40% of Dutch sales, generated steady cash, but the bonds were due in 2022 and 2023 and could not be refinanced on acceptable terms. Lion Capital sold to Marcel Boekhoorn’s investment vehicle Ramphastos in late 2018. Boekhoorn promised to reduce the debt, tried to sell the HEMA bakeries to raise cash and failed, and by June 2020, with the pandemic closing stores, a €50 million loan at the holding-company level was about to fall due.

The resolution came on 15 June 2020, when a group of bondholders agreed to swap €450 million of debt for shares, cutting HEMA’s debt to €300 million and removing Boekhoorn as owner. HEMA at that point employed about 19,000 people in eleven countries under chief executive Tjeerd Jegen. The bondholders then ran a sale process and in December 2020 agreed to sell HEMA for about €440 million to a partnership of Parcom, a Dutch private-equity firm, and Mississippi Ventures, the investment vehicle of the Van Eerd family that owns Jumbo. The deal closed in February 2021.

The lesson is arithmetic. HEMA’s enterprise value went from €1.3 billion in 2007 to roughly €750 million of debt plus not much equity in 2018, to €440 million in 2020. The business had not shrunk in proportion; the price was simply wrong in 2007, and every subsequent owner paid for that mistake until the bondholders absorbed it.

What has HEMA done under Parcom and the Van Eerd family?

Under Parcom and the Van Eerd family, and chief executive Saskia Egas Reparaz, HEMA has refurbished about 300 of its roughly 770 stores, narrowed its assortment to clothing, seasonal goods, home and personal care, and in its 2025 financial year grew adjusted gross sales 5.6% to €2.3 billion with adjusted operating profit up 16.1% to €108.2 million.

The turnaround has been unglamorous. With debt cut and new owners willing to invest, HEMA modernised stores under a “HEMA 100” concept rolled out to 125 stores in 2025, with more than 80 franchisee stores adopting it too. Profit before tax rose 48% to €59.4 million in 2025, and the company reported growth in revenue, volume, profit and customer satisfaction every year since 2021. The plan for the centenary year of 2026 is to refurbish 100 more stores and open 15 new ones, including in Belgium and France, with about 17,000 employees.

In December 2025 Mississippi Ventures agreed to buy Parcom’s remaining 50%, and the deal closed in February 2026 after the competition authority ACM approved it in January. The price was not disclosed. HEMA and Jumbo remain separate companies with separate management, but the family has said they will look for commercial benefits such as joint purchasing and shop-in-shop formats. HEMA’s financial recovery, and the family’s willingness to take full ownership, is the clearest evidence that the Dutch variety-store format works when it is not carrying a leveraged-buyout debt load.

Why did Blokker go bankrupt in 2024 after surviving for 128 years?

Blokker went bankrupt on 13 November 2024 because a decade of shrinking sales, competition from Action and online retailers, pandemic-era losses and a 2019 change of ownership that left it without deep-pocketed backing had exhausted its cash, and because its 394 stores could no longer cover their rents and wages.

The decline was long. In May 2017 Blokker Holding announced it would close around 200 Blokker and Marskramer stores and sell its other chains. In April 2019 the Blokker family sold the Blokker chain for €1 to Michiel Witteveen, the holding company’s chief executive, and the family provided additional funds to cover employee obligations; Witteveen’s Mirage Retail Group, which also owned Intertoys, Big Bazar, Miniso and BCC, ran it from then on. In February 2020 the Belgian and Luxembourg stores were sold and rebranded as Mega World, which itself went bankrupt in December 2020.

When the Amsterdam court declared Blokker bankrupt, it had 394 stores and about 3,500 employees. Administrators ran a liquidation sale that raised €103 million, about half of what the company had earned in the previous seven months, and closed 348 company-owned stores by the end of December 2024, with more than 3,300 jobs lost. Only around 40 to 45 franchise outlets stayed open. In March 2025 PB Capital, an investment vehicle of Ans Blokker, sister of the former chairmen Jaap and Ab Blokker, and her son Roland Palmer, bought the brand, the web shop and selected assets for €1 million.

Can Blokker’s 2025 relaunch work?

Blokker’s relaunch, led by Roland Palmer, reopened its first 12 stores on 18 June 2025, reached 40 by 30 July 2025 and announced five more openings from October 2025, with Palmer stating that the chain could support about 200 Dutch stores; whether it works depends on operating a smaller, cheaper, better-located network than the one that failed.

The new Blokker has several advantages over the old. It carries no legacy leases, no pension or restructuring liabilities and none of the 2019 holding-company debt. It chose its locations from the best-performing former sites and from towns where the brand’s absence was most felt, it brought back the chain’s older logo to signal continuity, and Palmer has said the company does not need outside investors for the foreseeable future. Reported early revenue exceeded expectations, and the chain asked customers to suggest new locations, an inexpensive form of demand testing.

The disadvantages are the same ones that sank the old Blokker: Action sells comparable household goods from 421 Dutch stores at lower prices, as described in the Action discount retail story, while bol and Amazon dominate the online purchase of kitchenware and small appliances. A 200-store Blokker would need to find a position between the two, probably as a convenient, mid-priced neighbourhood store with service that Action does not offer. The economics of 40 stores run by a family vehicle are very different from the economics of 400 run by a leveraged group, and that, rather than the brand, is the real test.

How empty are Dutch high streets really?

Dutch high streets are emptier than they were but not as empty as the headlines suggest: Locatus counted retail vacancy at 7.0% of premises at the end of 2025, up from 6.7% a year earlier and 6.2% at the start of 2024, with more than 14,000 units empty out of just over 205,000, while footfall rose 3% and physical-shop turnover grew 3.8% year on year in November 2025.

The longer trend is a shrinking retail stock rather than a wave of empty windows. The number of shops has fallen below 80,000 from 107,000 twenty years ago, a 26% decline, and the number of retail premises has fallen for ten consecutive years as former shops are converted to housing, hospitality, services or offices. That conversion is one reason why the vacancy rate has stayed in the 6–8% range rather than exploding, and why the Dutch housing shortage described in the Dutch housing shortage story has turned many former Blokker and V&D sites into apartments.

The pattern varies by location. The fifteen largest city centres saw vacancy fall slightly in 2025 as tourism, hospitality and flagship stores filled gaps, while smaller town centres continued to lose fashion and household chains and to refocus on daily needs: supermarkets, pharmacies, hairdressers and cafés. Retail parks, which had recovered to a 4.5% vacancy rate after 2020, saw the sharpest rise in 2025 following bankruptcies such as Carpetright. A high bankruptcy count in 2024–2025, including Blokker and several fashion and furnishing chains, fed directly into vacancy.

What role did private equity play in the decline?

Private equity played a decisive role because the three chains were all, at the moment of crisis, owned by financial investors who had bought them with debt or who were unwilling to fund further losses: KKR’s consortium and then Sun Capital at V&D, Lion Capital and then Ramphastos at HEMA, and the holding-company sale that preceded Mirage Retail Group at Blokker.

The 2004 Vendex KBB buy-out set the pattern. The consortium broke up a group that had owned V&D and HEMA together since the 1999 Vendex–KBB merger, sold the parts at high prices, and in doing so transferred to each chain a debt load calibrated to the optimistic growth assumptions of the mid-2000s. When Dutch non-food retail sales stagnated after 2008 and online competition intensified, the debt did not shrink with the business. HEMA’s bondholders eventually took the loss; V&D’s owner chose bankruptcy over further funding.

The counter-example is instructive. Under Parcom, a Dutch private-equity firm, and the Van Eerd family, HEMA has grown profit every year since 2021, because the purchase price was realistic, the debt was modest and the owners invested in stores. Private equity did not kill the Dutch high street; over-priced, over-leveraged private equity did. The same distinction applies to the Brenninkmeyer family’s C&A, a family-owned fashion chain that has shrunk in the Netherlands but never faced a solvency crisis.

What can founders and investors learn from HEMA, Blokker and V&D?

Founders and investors can learn that retail brands outlive their balance sheets, that the right purchase price matters more than the right strategy, and that a shrinking high street still rewards operators who control costs, choose locations carefully and own their own capital.

The first lesson is about debt. HEMA’s problems between 2007 and 2020 were almost entirely financial; the stores kept trading and the brand stayed one of the best-loved in the country. Once the debt was cut, profit followed within a few years. A retailer with a sound format should never carry debt sized to a growth plan it cannot deliver.

The second lesson is about ownership. V&D’s owner, Blokker’s 2019 owner and HEMA’s 2018 owner all lacked either the capital or the commitment to see a turnaround through. The owners who succeeded, Parcom and the Van Eerd family at HEMA and, provisionally, the Blokker family at the new Blokker, were patient, local and willing to invest.

The third lesson is about scale. The new Blokker with 40 stores may be a better business than the old one with 400, and HEMA with 770 refurbished stores is more profitable than HEMA with 750 tired ones. In a market where the shop count has fallen by a quarter, the winners are those who pick the right quarter to keep. The Netherlands Company Stories hub collects further cases, and the UK Company Stories hub offers parallels from a high street that has gone through the same cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions