Two thirds of UK fashion companies ever incorporated have already left the register. Almost none of them appear in the insolvency statistics.
We read the Companies House register for all 189,178 incorporated UK fashion companies. By our snapshot date, 122,815 had dissolved. That is 64.9%, at a median of 1.5 years from incorporation. 96.1% of those exits went by voluntary strike off, a route that appears in no insolvency series.
A single year shows the size of the gap. In 2025 our cohort recorded 22,437 dissolutions. 500 entered a formal insolvency process. The other 21,937 left no insolvency record at all. Meanwhile the measure the industry watches is moving the other way, with company insolvencies in England and Wales falling to 1,868 in May 2026, 16% below the same month a year earlier. Both figures are correct. They answer different questions, and the report works through what it costs to rely on the wrong one.
Failure here means leaving the register, which is not the same as insolvency and not the same as a failed brand
Companies use strike off for dormant shells, redundant subsidiaries, retirements and abandoned plans as well as for businesses that ran out of cash, and Companies House states plainly that it is not an alternative to formal insolvency. A large share of the 122,815 will be removals without distress. Status data cannot tell us which, so we report formal insolvency separately throughout.
The two exit routes are not cleanly separable, which is where the measurement gap does damage
Leading Labels, a fifteen-store discount chain founded in 1993, received a first strike off notice in March 2026 and was in liquidation by 26 May with every store closing. Read only the insolvency statistics and the first three months of that are invisible.
Age decides which route a company takes, and only older failures leave a record of creditor exposure
Among dissolved companies, none under a year old ended in formal insolvency, and 0.2% of those aged one to two. That rises to 15.2% at six to ten years and 23.9% past eleven. Young companies leave quietly. Older companies that fail take suppliers, staff and landlords with them.
Each incorporation cohort dissolves faster than the one before it
Share dissolved by year three runs 27.3% for 2014, 43.4% for 2016, 53.9% for 2018, 61.8% for 2020 and 70.1% for 2022. Year five moves the same way, one step behind. Later cohorts are larger and skew towards speculative micro formations, so part of the rise is a change in what gets registered rather than deterioration alone, and we have not separated the two. The direction holds at both ages.
2025 is the first year in our series where the cohort shrank
For most of the decade, incorporations ran ahead of dissolutions. In 2025 the lines crossed, with 16,005 incorporations against 22,437 dissolutions and a net decline of 6,432. Formal insolvencies moved too, from 300 to 350 a year through 2023 to 438 in 2024 and 500 in 2025, 49% above 2023. That count excludes strike off, which makes it the cleaner distress signal, and it runs opposite to the national series.
The register is free, public and updated the day a company’s status changes, which makes it usable before an invoice goes out
If your risk signals come from the trade press, you are watching the loudest few percent. If they come from insolvency statistics, you are watching a measure built to count something else. Overdue accounts and a first strike off notice are filed facts, not forecasts, and any supplier can check both. COORD is built on reading that record.
Source: Companies House register, all SIC-coded UK fashion companies. Formal insolvency counts from the same register. National comparison from Insolvency Service monthly statistics, England and Wales.
