‘We firmly believe that the market opportunity exists for Disturbia to continue to grow and reach a wider audience’

A Northumberland alternative clothing and lifestyle brand is toasting a 50% rise in revenues, with more global growth set to come. Disturbia – a portmanteau of ‘disturb’ and ‘suburbia’ – was launched in 2003 by Northumbria University fashion and photography graduates Francis and Helen Major, with the pair wanting to create unconventional clothing with a nod to the dark side of popular culture, subversive iconography and “a quintessential British punk DIY ethic”.

The husband-and-wife team started our by printing T-shirt designs thanks to a small loan from Francis’s parents – and the business got a boost when the tops were discovered by Julian Dunkerton, the co-founder of Superdry and Cult Clothing, at a trade show.

Today, Harper & Willow Ltd – which trades under the brand name Disturbia – manufactures and sells everything from dresses and tops to jackets, shirts, jumpers and jeans. As well as clothing, it also sells accessories including jewellery, footwear and homeware through its website and app.

And following investment, the company – with offices in Cramlington and London – has grown to become a global fashion and lifestyle brand, with more than half of all sales coming from outside of the UK.

The firm, known for its alternative fashion combining elements of dark romance, fantasy and fable, has now published accounts for the year ended January 2026, showing revenues rose from £35.1m to £52.8m, while pre-tax profits reached £12.5m, up from £8.5m. Operating profit was also £12.5m, up from £8.2m, and the overall profit for the year was £9.35m, up from £6.35m. Ordinary dividends were paid amounting to £16.67m.

A breakdown of turnover showed £16.35m came from the UK, while the remaining £36.5m was accrued from Rest of the World markets. Employee numbers also rose significantly, from 48 in 2025 to 68. That increase took the wages bill up from £2.27m to £3.27m.

The company received initial backing from Refined Capital Partners (RCP) in 2023 to help fuel growth. Earlier this year RCP announced that Digital Fuel Capital had then come on board to take a minority stake in Disturbia, further reinforcing Disturbia’s accelerated expansion in the US, which already represented nearly half of the brand’s global turnover.

In the accounts, Richard Leeson, CEO, said the company had launched a new European fulfilment centre, adding to existing centres in the UK and US.

He said: “Turnover in 2026 increased by 50.5% to £52.8m from £35.1m in 2025. The key drivers behind this growth being an increase in the product offering which now includes a broader range of lifestyle and accessories as well as expanding clothing offerings, more investment into digital marketing spend to reach a wider audience and improved customer proposition.

“In January 2025 we opened a fulfilment centre in the EU which allowed us to provide an enhanced offering to our customers in that region, from speed of delivery, lack of cross border duties and the ease of returns this has helped us grow our presence in the EU and provide a strong foundation for future growth and development.”

He said that the firm’s gross margin dropped by 1.2% as the impact of tariffs in the US put pressure on margins, alongside strategic decisions to increase promotional activity and discounting during a challenging final quarter.

He added: “We firmly believe that the market opportunity exists for Disturbia to continue to grow and reach a wider audience as we continue to invest in product development, brand awareness and digital marketing, customer proposition in all of our key regions and look to expand into new revenue channels.”

Starbucks is laying off over 200 corporate workers as it moves forward with the turnaround strategy that it began two years ago under CEO Brian Niccol.

The coffee giant on Thursday published a layoff notice under the WARN Act, clarifying plans to cut over 200 corporate roles after it previously disclosed plans to reduce the corporate workforce by about 300 jobs.

The WARN filing indicated that about 120 of the employee separations are associated with workers from its support team focused on designing and developing coffeehouses who declined the opportunity to relocate from Seattle, Washington, to Nashville, Tennessee.

Additionally, about 104 cuts are organizational changes resulting from restructuring plans detailed in May.

STARBUCKS’ TURNAROUND PLAN SHOWS PROMISE IN US AS SALES GROWTH RETURNS FOR FIRST TIME IN 2 YEARS

Starbucks submitted a filing with details about over 200 job cuts. (Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The expected date of the first separations will be Oct. 19, 2026, with all completed by Nov. 1, 2026.

Starbucks indicated the organizational changes aren’t altering the company’s coffeehouse strategy, and it is moving forward with its “third place experience” of uplifting coffeehouses and expanding and developing its portfolio.

The filing represents the last component of Starbucks’ remaining organizational changes from the restructuring announced in May so that it can focus on improving the experience at its coffeehouses and those of its employee partners and customers, according to the company.

STARBUCKS TO CLOSE STORES, CUT JOBS AS PART OF TURNAROUND STRATEGY

The company is building a new regional corporate office in Nashville that comes with a price tag of $100 million and will house about 2,000 employees, though it is keeping its headquarters in Seattle.

After Niccol took the helm at Starbucks in September 2024, becoming the company’s third CEO in a two-year period, he put the company on a turnaround plan to spur more business in coffeehouses.

STARBUCKS CEO SAYS COFFEE CHAIN IS ‘AHEAD OF SCHEDULE’ IN MAJOR TURNAROUND EFFORT AFTER ONE YEAR

Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is pursuing a turnaround strategy at the coffee giant. (Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company)

The plan has featured efforts to redesign interiors to encourage customers to linger, along with “personal touches,” like writing names on cups and serving drinks in mugs.

It’s also working to ensure proper staffing at stores, streamlining mobile orders, letting customers handle their own condiments and committing to having all drinks ready in four minutes or less.

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Last year, Starbucks moved to close some underperforming stores and cut 900 non-retail partner roles, while also freezing many open positions as it restructured.

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Almost as soon as your products or services set foot on EU soil, you should apply for a VAT status and pay VAT in Europe. You generally still have to pay or file VAT in your home country for any sales made to domestic customers, but you don´t need to pay VAT in your home country for international sales.

So if you want to expand internationally and into the European (EU) market, you must apply for VAT registration if you:

• Store goods in an EU country
• Exceed the €10,000 EU-wide distance sales threshold
• Import goods or perform local B2B taxable operations

Applying for VAT in the EU as an international business is not as simple as filling out an online application. Below, we´ve created a comprehensive guide to VAT registration in Europe, including everything international businesses should know.

Applying For VAT Registration in Europe

VAT in Europe is the same as in any country. In the EU, the VAT Directive is the most common framework, but each of the 27 Member States operates its own registration system, which can make it confusing. They also all apply their own VAT rates and administrative procedures. The EU requires a standard rate of at least 15%, but the actual standard and reduced rates vary by country and product category.

And the complexity grows.

There is no ordinary single EU VAT number covering every activity, such as storing goods or importing goods, which, as we said in the introduction, would trigger the need for VAT. A national authority issues a VAT identification number for the activities registered in that jurisdiction.

Businesses can use the EU’s VIES system to validate VAT numbers used for intra-EU trade.

In 2025, the EU introduced a cross-border SME exemption which applies to qualifying EU-established small businesses with total EU turnover no higher than €100,000 and subject to the relevant national threshold. It´s not automatically applied, and it is something you need to apply for.

How Easy Is It to Register for VAT in Europe as an International Business?

There is no single application process for standard registration, which makes it complicated. You need to submit an application to the tax authority in the relevant country. That said, once you cross the €10,000 threshold, you can report it collectively through the One Stop Shop (OSS) scheme rather than registering in every nation.

A non-EU business supplying services to EU consumers can use the Non-Union OSS. The Union OSS can cover eligible intra-EU distance sales of goods dispatched from EU stock.

To apply, we recommend using a fiscal representative like Easytax to manage the complex systems, which absolutely will be more of a headache than in your home country. Some Member States, such as Spain, France, and Italy, require non-EU businesses to appoint a fiscal representative.

Required evidence varies, but you typically need to submit:

• Incorporation documents
• Proof of the company’s home country tax status
• Details of directors
• Contracts
• Invoices
• Expected transaction flows
• Warehouse information and bank details

Some authorities also request certified translations, notarisation or an apostille.

Important Things to Be Aware of About Paying VAT in the EU as an International Business

There are so many nuances to be aware of. Some of the most important are:

• Businesses must distinguish between B2B and B2C transactions.
• For many cross-border B2B services, VAT is accounted for by the customer under the reverse charge.
• For eligible B2C distance sales, VAT is generally charged at the rate applicable in the customer’s destination country.
• All commercial goods imported into the EU are potentially subject to VAT, and the former exemption for consignments worth up to €22 has been removed.
• Companies should plan for import VAT cash flow, local VAT payment deadlines, currency conversions and the conditions for deducting or reclaiming input VAT.
• The EU’s VAT in the Digital Age programme clarifies OSS and IOSS from 1 January 2027, so look out for changes.

If you want to expand and grow across Europe as an international business, you will need to register for and pay VAT as well as continue to pay it on sales made within your national country. Understanding how to apply and doing it right is so important to avoid potential fines and further action/business disruption.

It is half past four on the last Friday of the month, and in the back office of a kitchen fittings supplier in Leeds the office manager is doing what she does every month. She exports the sales ledger from the accounts package.

She downloads a takings summary from the till system. Then she opens the spreadsheet, the one with tabs going back to 2021, and starts copying figures across, checking each column against the bank feed as she goes. By seven o’clock on Monday morning there will be a tidy one-page report waiting on the meeting room table: turnover by product line, debtors over sixty days, wages as a share of sales.

This routine works. It has worked for years. The directors trust the numbers because they know precisely how they were put together, and the business has grown steadily on the back of decisions made around that Monday table. Nothing about the ritual deserves criticism. It does, however, deserve a second look, because the several hours of skilled attention it consumes every month have become optional in a way they were not five years ago.

The data is already there

Small firms in the UK now hold more usable information about their own trading than at any point in their history. The accounts package records every invoice and payment. The till logs every sale, down to the minute. Payroll, stock, website orders and delivery schedules all sit in software of one kind or another, each system dutifully accumulating a record of how the business actually behaves.

What happens next is where the opportunity sits. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology published its UK Business Data Survey 2026 in June, and it found that while 86 per cent of UK businesses handle digitised data, only 25 per cent analyse that data to draw insight from it. Put another way, much of the value already sitting inside those systems goes unused, and a firm that starts using it gains ground that few of its rivals are even contesting.

Where the spreadsheet strains

None of this means abandoning Excel, and it certainly doesn’t mean the spreadsheet was a mistake. For a generation of owners it has been the most flexible business tool ever made, and many of them know it inside out. The monthly report described above exists because somebody capable built it, and it has answered real questions month after month for years.

The strain shows in three places. First, the re-keying: every figure copied by hand from one system into another is a figure that can be mistyped, and the checking needed to catch those slips often takes longer than the copying itself. Second, version confusion: once “March report v3 FINAL” and “March report v3 FINAL amended” both exist on the shared drive, an hour can disappear into working out which one the meeting actually saw. Third, and most costly, the finished report describes last month. A pricing problem that appears in the first week of April stays invisible until the second week of May, by which time it has been running for five weeks. These are the classic signs of when a business outgrows Excel for reporting, and they say more about the growing complexity of the firm than about anyone’s skills.

What a live report changes

The alternative is a live report: a single dashboard connected directly to the accounts package and the till data, refreshed automatically on a schedule, and visible to everyone who should see it. There is one version of the numbers. Nobody re-keys anything. The Monday routine shrinks from an afternoon of assembly to a few minutes of reading, and the questions asked in the meeting change character, from “are these figures right?” to “why did trade counter sales dip on Thursdays?”

For many small firms the tool for this job is already paid for. Power BI, Microsoft’s business intelligence software (software that turns raw company data into charts, reports and dashboards), is included in or available alongside many Microsoft 365 subscriptions, sitting a few clicks from the Outlook and Excel licences the business already runs on. It’s hardly a niche product either: Microsoft reported in September 2025 that Power BI and its wider Fabric platform had passed 30 million monthly active users. Ready-made connectors, the links that pull data from one system into another, exist for the common UK accounts packages and till systems, so joining the data to the dashboard is largely a matter of configuration rather than custom development.

The skills step is smaller than it looks

The honest obstacle is confidence. A study by Qlik covering more than 7,000 executives and employees found that just 11 per cent of employees feel fully confident in their data literacy, meaning their ability to read, interpret and question data. Small firms feel this more sharply than large ones, because there’s no analytics department down the corridor to lean on.

Hiring a data specialist rarely makes sense for a fifteen-person firm. The more practical route is to train the person who already owns the numbers, because they bring something no outside analyst could: they know what the figures mean, which customers sit behind the debtor balance, and why February looks strange every year. Structured training closes the gap faster than many people expect. Red Eagle Tech, a London-based Microsoft Solutions Partner that has trained more than 200 professionals, runs a two-day Power BI masterclass delivered live online, with no prior experience needed and a format built around producing real reports rather than sitting through theory. Two days is a modest investment against a task that currently absorbs several hours every month, indefinitely.

One report, one person, one quarter

The way to start is deliberately narrow. Pick the single report that gets rebuilt by hand every month, the one whose assembly takes the most patience, and make that the whole of the first project. Choose the person who currently builds it, book their training, and give them the time to reproduce that one report as a live dashboard before the quarter ends. Resist the urge to add extra charts or new measures on the first pass; matching the old report exactly is what earns the directors’ trust in the new numbers.

Run the two side by side for a month if it helps, then let the spreadsheet version retire with the respect it has earned. If the Leeds office manager starts in September, she can walk into the first Monday meeting of December carrying the same one-page report the directors have read for years, produced in four minutes instead of four hours, and current to the previous evening’s till close. That is the whole ambition for the quarter, and it is enough.

Shares of GameStop Corp. have fallen 17.85% over the past month, trading at $17.88 as of 10:59 a.m. EDT Thursday, as investors continue reacting to a dilutive debt-for-equity exchange announced earlier this month alongside growing skepticism regarding Chief Executive Ryan Cohen’s ambitions to acquire a stake in eBay.

The decline traces back to Aug. 3, when GameStop disclosed a privately negotiated agreement to exchange roughly $1.4 billion of its zero-coupon convertible senior notes, split between issues maturing in 2030 and 2032, for newly issued shares of Class A common stock. According to Benzinga, GameStop entered into agreements with certain noteholders to exchange approximately $400 million of the 2030 notes and $1.0 billion of the 2032 notes for company stock, a move that allows GameStop to reduce its long-term debt without spending any cash, since the company will receive no cash proceeds from the stock issuance itself.

Shares plunged sharply on the news. According to Tickeron, GME fell 10.64% during regular trading on Aug. 3 to approximately $19.41, after dropping further in premarket trading. Benzinga reported the stock down 11.14% to $19.30 during premarket hours that same day, touching what was then a new 52-week low. GuruFocus separately reported the stock declining 11.1% to close at $19.31 on Aug. 3, with a related report citing a 12.6% single-day drop to $18.99, reflecting the volatility and differing intraday reference points across coverage of the selloff that day.

The core concern driving the selloff centers on dilution: because the exchange converts debt directly into new shares rather than raising cash, it increases GameStop’s total outstanding share count without adding new capital to the balance sheet, which can reduce the value of existing shareholders’ stakes. According to Yahoo Finance, GameStop’s stock recently touched a two-year low of $17.92 amid these dilution concerns.

Compounding investor anxiety has been persistent skepticism over Cohen’s broader strategic ambitions involving eBay. According to Benzinga, the stock’s decline coincided with investors continuing to assess GameStop’s aggressive build-up of a 9.8% stake in eBay Inc., alongside Wall Street’s doubts about Cohen’s reported takeover interest in the e-commerce company. Yahoo Finance reported that GameStop is now said to be considering a partnership arrangement with eBay instead of pursuing an outright acquisition, a potential shift in strategy that has added further uncertainty to how investors are valuing the stock.

The mechanics of the debt exchange itself remain a significant overhang on the shares. According to a report from finance outlet Daytraders.com, the actual number of new shares GameStop will need to issue depends partly on the volume-weighted average price of the company’s stock over a 35-trading-day reference period that began Aug. 3, subject to a per-share price floor. That structure means continued weakness in GameStop’s stock price during the reference window could result in a larger number of new shares being issued, potentially compounding the dilution investors are already bracing for. GameStop has cautioned that participating noteholders may buy, sell or enter into derivative transactions to hedge their positions during this period, which the company has said could materially affect the market price of both its common stock and its convertible notes. According to that same report, the exchange has an expected closing date of Sept. 23, and GameStop held $4.17 billion in long-term debt as of May 2.

Despite the sharp pullback, some financial data providers have flagged the stock as trading well above their estimated intrinsic value even after the decline. According to GuruFocus’s GF Value model, GameStop was trading roughly 50% to 51% above its calculated intrinsic value estimate of $12.63 in the days immediately following the Aug. 3 announcement, with the firm’s broader GF Score, a composite measure of fundamental health, sitting at a middling 56 out of 100. GuruFocus specifically flagged GameStop’s Growth sub-rank as its weakest metric, at just 1 out of 10, reflecting the company’s ongoing revenue contraction in its core brick-and-mortar video game retail business, a trend that has persisted for years amid the broader industry shift toward digital game downloads and subscription-based platforms.

GameStop’s cryptocurrency treasury strategy, another closely watched element of Cohen’s broader turnaround plan, has also failed to provide meaningful offsetting support for the stock. According to Yahoo Finance, Bitcoin’s roughly 28% year-to-date decline has weighed on the value of GameStop’s crypto holdings, adding a further layer of uncertainty to the stock’s overall investment case. A separate Yahoo Finance report similarly noted that Bitcoin has continued to struggle to sustainably break above the $70,000 level, undermining what had once been positioned as a key pillar of the company’s balance sheet diversification strategy.

Adding to the challenges facing prospective GME investors, the stock currently carries no formal Wall Street analyst coverage, according to Yahoo Finance’s reporting, meaning shareholders largely lack traditional sell-side research and price targets to help contextualize the company’s valuation and prospects, leaving much of the public discourse around the stock driven by retail investor sentiment and financial media coverage rather than institutional analyst consensus.

On a more positive note for the underlying business, GameStop has continued to project meaningful operational improvement despite its ongoing core retail struggles. According to Tickeron, the company expects to generate adjusted EBITDA in excess of $600 million for fiscal 2026, up substantially from $345.4 million in fiscal 2025, a projection management has pointed to as evidence that its broader cost-cutting and store optimization efforts are beginning to bear fruit even as legacy retail sales continue to decline.

Looking ahead, GameStop’s next major scheduled catalyst arrives with its fiscal second-quarter earnings report, expected around Sept. 8, according to Benzinga, which is likely to offer investors additional clarity on both the company’s core operating performance and any further developments regarding the eBay stake and the pending debt exchange. Until then, the stock’s near-term trajectory is likely to remain closely tied to the ongoing 35-day pricing window determining the ultimate scale of dilution from the convertible note exchange, alongside broader market sentiment toward both GameStop’s turnaround strategy and its unconventional approach to capital allocation under Cohen’s leadership.