Homebase has acquired collapsed retailer Bathstore, but at least 200 jobs at the bathroom specialist are still at risk.
Home and garden giant Homebase said it had acquired Bathstore's website and 44 stores, safeguarding around 150 jobs on the shopfloor and another 25 at head office.
Some 159 redundancies have already been made at Bathstore since BDO were appointed as administrators last month.
Now the future of another 200 jobs at those stores not included in the transaction has been thrown into doubt, with the remaining 91 stores set to close once display stock has been sold off.
At the time of its administration, Bathstore employed 531 people and had 135 stores.
Its demise was blamed on several months of difficult trading, as well as the failure of talks to find a buyer.
Homebase has said it will roll out a number of Bathstore concessions into its stores over the coming 18 months.
Chief executive Damian McGloughlin said the acquisition "complements Homebase's reinvigorated range" and said the business had been working to reintroduce popular ranges.
"As a result of the hard work of the Homebase team, our turnaround is ahead of plan," he said.
"While we still have a significant amount of work to do, the customer response to our new ranges has been very encouraging and we are on track to break even this year against a loss of over £100 million last year."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here