F/NL – The Paris-based Solo Group purchased the Dutch importer, the Mid Ocean Group, on June 16, 2022. To serve the development of the promotional products market and accommodate the trade’s desire for one-stop-shop offers more efficiently, Solo and midocean already entered a cooperation in 2020. Since then, several products from the Solo portfolio – including customization – have also been offered to the customers of midocean. The success of this collaboration as well as synergies regarding the geographical position, the operative infrastructure and company values prompted Solo at the beginning of 2022 to start preparing the acquisition.
Alain Milgrom, President and founder of the Solo Group: “During the past 10 years, midocean has impressively taken a leading position as a multi-category and full-service supplier of hard-goods in Europe. The still fragmented promotional market today is increasingly demanding services and efficiencies across the value chain. Our objective has always been to deliver the best service to our customers, always acting in ‘fair spirit’. This includes offering a full-service solution to stimulate the appeal for promotional textiles among end users. When combining the strengths of both companies, this is exactly what I envision to happen, in the best interests of all our customers. We do believe that the combination of our companies will enable and boost the Solo Group’s brand awareness and desirability, creating benefit to our entire network of customers.”
The Managing Director of Solo, Audélia Krief, added: “Midocean is a fantastic opportunity for our Group to diversify, adding a completely new product category and service, which is printed hard goods. By investing severely in process and system automation and digitalisation, midocean has indeed proven to be the benchmark in terms of portfolio accessibility, print quality consistency and delivery lead times. When combining both companies, customers will have direct access to extensive inventories of promotional textiles that will be decorated and drop shipped to end users as efficiently and quickly as resellers have become used to for hard goods. Furthermore, with textiles, we are addressing very diverse markets such as workwear, souvenir, merchandising, print on demand, retail/e-tail, etc. We will therefore continue to nurture our current distribution network with the best products.”
And Stephen Gibson, CEO of midocean, added, “It is because of the previously mentioned reason that midocean has always envisioned a collaboration with an established textile specialist of promotional textiles. This will instantly strengthen the company’s presentation as a multi-category-specialist supplier, resulting in the most comprehensive item portfolio in the industry, instantly available including print/decoration. The Solo Group is one of the leading textile specialists of customisable textiles in Europe and I am delighted to have found in the Solo Group, the partner to pursue this vision.”
Midocean has been a full-range stockist on the European promotional products market for over 50 years. With more than 800 employees, eight sales subsidiaries throughout Europe and its own logistics and printing centre, the Dutch company serves over 9,000 customers in Europe. The Solo Group derived from a company that was founded in Paris by Alain Milgrom in 1991, which pursued the mission of combining fashionable promotional textiles with sustainable working methods, under the brand name Sol’s. The Solo Group was founded in 2020 to launch three new brands: RTP Apparel, Atelier Textile Français and Neoblu. The brand Joy Thaï also makes up part of the line-up.
www.sologroup-paris.com
www.midocean.com
