£350m Card Factory deal completes

ENTREPRENEUR Dean Hoyle’s Card Factory has been sold to London private equity firm Charterhouse for £350m, it was confirmed yesterday afternoon.

Charterhouse Capital Partners has bought the Wakefield-based business, which was established in 1997. 

Mr Hoyle is understood to have reaped a windfall of around £350m following the completion of the deal.

Read Deputy Editor Ian Briggs’ blog on the deal.

Mr Hoyle will retain a stake in the company and its existing management will continue to run the business.

Other potential suitors believed to have expressed an interest in buying Card Factory, which was established in 1997 by Mr Hoyle and his wife Janet, include Permira, Cinven, Summit Partners and Warburg Pincus.

Sportswift, which trades as Card Factory, is expected to report turnover of £210m for 2009.

It made pre-tax profits of £29m on sales of £167m in the year to January 31, 2009.

Mr Hoyle, 42, is the chairman of League One football club Huddersfield Town and controls the club. He is known to have ambitions to take the club as high up the football pyramid as possible.

Mr and Mrs Hoyle opened their first shop in 1997 and in 2008 bought 76 stores from rival Celebrations, which owned the Card Warehouse and Card Fair Brands, after it went into administration.

It now has more than 430 stores.

The deal will also prove a fillip to the Yorkshire corporate finance market as a number of advisors on the deal are known to be based in this region, including KPMG, led by Christian Mayo, which acted for Card Factory.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ transaction services team in Leeds undertook vendor due diligence comprising financial due diligence (Nigel Ward, partner and Jonathan Rhodes, director) and commercial due diligence (Andrew Garbutt, director, retail strategy, London).

A separate PwC team, based in London, also advised Charterhouse.