Fashion retailer Next has announced a deal to buy collapsed homewares seller Made.com for £3.4 million.

The news comes less than 18 months after Made went public with a valuation of £775 million. The deal however does represent a premium over its final market cap before it ceased trading and entered administration when it was valued at around £2 million.

PwC, which was appointed as Made’s administrator last week, confirmed on Wednesday that Next has bought the brand, website and intellectual property. The deal however does not include staff, meaning there will be around 400 redundancies. Nor does it include the company’s remaining inventory, which will be sold off by PwC.

The administrator also confirmed that 4,500 outstanding customer orders in the UK and Europe would be fulfilled, but around 12,000 which are still in production or yet to leave Asia cannot be concluded. Affected customers will be directed to submit a creditor claim to administrators.

Made.com's remaining assets including payments made to creditors have been taken over by PwC, the firm said.

For Next this is the latest acquisition as it continues to acquire smaller retailers, having previously picked up brands including Victoria’s Secret UK and Reiss. It operates over 500 stores and has a significant online presence.

Next chief executive and prominent Brexiteer Simon Wolfson was interviewed by the BBC on Thursday morning to call on the UK government to allow more migrant workers into the country in order to ease labour shortages.

“"I think in respect of immigration, it's definitely not the Brexit that I wanted, or indeed, many of the people who voted Brexit wanted,” he said.

"We have got people queuing up to come to this country to pick crops that are rotting in fields, to work in warehouses that otherwise wouldn't be operable, and we're not letting them in. And we have to take a different approach to economically productive migration."

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