Liz Faulkner

And the greetings card industry is phenomenally strong in the UK.

We were owed quite a lot of money at the point that Paper Chase went under, around about £20,000, which for us was a lot of money.

And at the point where they went into administration, we were offered a small percentage of what was owed on the condition that we would trade with the new company on the same terms as we had with the previous company.

And it's not something that we felt that we could do because that would involve us having more supply bills and

we wouldn't want to be in a position where we couldn't pay our suppliers and we at this point didn't trust the new paper chase to be able to pay us in the 60 days.

So we would have to wait two months having been paid a fraction of what we were owed, resupplying and then waiting to find out whether we were going to get paid for that new order.

So we decided not to carry on stocking them at that point.

Yes.

And this is the case for a lot of small publishers.

There's a group of us who've gone through this all together.

So basically, we were never paid for the product and it was sold to the new company.

And it was still on sale in the shops.

And for a lot of us, that was causing extreme financial hardship.

With tiny companies, it has an immediate knock-on on your day-to-day life.

And so that was incredibly difficult.

It felt like them selling stolen product.

You can dress it up however you want, but that's certainly how it feels when you're a small publisher in that situation.

So I would ask how they can claim that those assets are theirs if they've never been paid for.

It's very hard to understand as a small publisher that suddenly that's legal and allowed that they can sell product to the new company that's never been paid for.

At one point in our existence, we were about 90% reliant on paper chase.