'Dated business model' and 'bad location' blamed

Maison Mode is now little more than a memory among the high-end department stores in Beijing, after a period of business in which it failed to nail the market. METRO decided to find out what went wrong.

The department store shut up shop on the last day of 2009 at its last surviving Beijing location - in the CBD - just over one year after it opened in October 2008. It had already closed its first store in Xidan in March 2009. The retreat was extensive with more stores also shut in Shanghai and Xian. Only those in second-tier cities remained, such as Changsha, Chengdu, Shenyang, Chongqing and Urumqi.