What the losing bidders planned to do with Galleria

The Galeria's new owners are old friends. There was also another bidder: Here the frustrated investing couple explain what would have made it better.

sFelix Wenger and Melina Brandstetter are pretty sure they could have done it. “We believe that stationery retail can be revitalized again,” says Wenger, who runs the Upventure family office in Düsseldorf with Brandstetter. What the 47-year-old is actually referring to is a retail company that represents the decline of stationery like no other: the Galleria department store group.

The pair of investors were still vying for the trader as of Monday afternoon. They wanted to make the department store fit for the future again after the group was forced to file for bankruptcy for a third time at the start of the year. Nothing will come of it now. In the bidding competition, they lost to a consortium led by American investor NRDC and Bernd Betz, a German businessman and president of the SV Waldhof Mannheim football club.