Lands End Home Shopping Business For Sale

The Lands' End home shopping business is reported to have been put up for sale by owner Sears Roebuck less than three years after it was acquired by the US retailer.

US trade journal Women's Wear Daily has reported that Sears has put a price tag of £1.2bn on Lands' End in presentations to a small number of potential buyers, substantially below the $1.9bn it paid for the business in 2002.

Sears, which has agreed a merger with the K-Mart retail business, in understood to believe that Lands' End is a poor fit with the new business. Lands' End is the largest specialist clothing catalogue retailer in the US, as well as the largest seller of clothes online, Since the takeover, Sears has also sold Lands' End clothing ranges in some of its stores.

Potential buyers are understood to include private equity group Texas Pacific, which has a majority stake in clothing retailer J Crew, and David Dyer, president and chief executive of Tommy Hilfiger and a former boss of Lands' End. Lands' End announced 375 job cuts last month, as it restructures the business to cope with an increase in online orders and a corresponding fall in telephone orders.