Doubletake Studios in administration

A PHOTOGRAPHY studio with an operation in Manchester has gone into administration with the loss of 800 jobs – 156 of them in the city.

 

Doubletake Studios, which was headquartered in London and also had operations in Birmingham and Southampton, employed 450 direct staff and a further 350 contractors.

 

Phillip Armstrong and Geoff Rowley, partners at insolvency firm FRP Advisory have been appointed joint administrators.

 

A total of 355 staff were employed at the company’s Bakers Row and Clerkenwell Close studios in Farringdon, with 156 in its Manchester studio and a further 166 and 136  respectively at its Birmingham and Southampton studios.

 

FRP said the company had suffered severe cash flow problems caused by the deferred nature of its revenue streams and was unable to discharge significant arrears of crown debt. In the event, the company was unable to pay costs to suppliers that would have enabled it to continue trading.

 

Mr Armstrong said: “Despite exploring payment options with HMRC, the company’s historic debt and the company’ s short term cashflow proved unmanageable, and we are now undergoing the process of closing the business down. We will be working with management to fulfil outstanding orders and assisting the Redundancy Payments Office in processing redundancy payments for staff.

 

“The situation is regrettable, but having explored options it was found that Doubletake Studios was not viable for a sale as a going concern and we were forced to begin the shutdown process.”