ZURICH. Micasa has a new owner, 70 fewer jobs, and customers still waiting for furniture they have already paid for. A Swiss investor group led by the logistics entrepreneur Toni Shala is taking all the shares in Micasa AG and putting in fresh capital, the company said on Monday. In the same breath it confirmed four shop closures and said supplier bills, late since the chain left Migros, are being put back on a schedule.
The job cut is the hard edge of the announcement. Seventy employees face redundancy. The branch in Crissier, in Vaud, closes on 31 December 2026. Brügg in Bern, Langendorf in Solothurn and Buchs in Aargau close on 31 January 2027. Micasa says it is looking at jobs elsewhere in the company for the people affected, that it regrets the step, and that no further closures are planned. Philipp Agustoni and Manuel Landolt, who have run the chain, stay in operational charge.
A second owner in less than two years
This is the second change of control since Migros let the furniture chain go. In February 2025 the retailer sold Micasa in a management buyout to Agustoni, then chief executive, and Landolt, then chief operating officer, backed by the investment firm Rethink and private investors. The new Micasa AG has run the business on its own since September 2025. Building IT and logistics that Migros used to provide was harder than the sale pitch. Invoices to suppliers sat unpaid. Deliveries stalled.
Shala’s group is the answer the company is offering to that cash problem. The name became public on Monday evening, after an earlier confirmation that an unnamed Swiss group would buy 100 per cent. The company says the new owners have released extra funds and secured financing for the next stage. Binding agreements with the suppliers who were kept waiting are meant to get payments back to normal as quickly as possible. Micasa also says logistics and customer support are stable again, and that outstanding deliveries are now being worked through as a priority.
The customer who paid and is still waiting
Blick reported the version of that story that arrives in a flat. A customer in the Zurich region ordered a sofa and a dining table ahead of a house move, and paid CHF 5,088. Neither piece came. She was told the delivery had been stopped. The supplier, contacted directly, said the stop was because Micasa was not paying. The table has since been refunded. At the time of the report, CHF 2,689 for the sofa was still outstanding. A second card charge for the same sofa, taken when she tried to get the money back in the Volketswil branch, was later reversed by the card company. The table, the paper noted, could still be ordered on the website.
That is a worse position than a late van. The money has left the account, the room is empty, and the explanation sat with a supplier rather than with the shop that took the payment. Micasa’s reply to Blick was the same reply as in the takeover statement: delays happened in the transition, agreements are being put in place, the new owners have provided money, and open orders are a priority. It did not, in that account, put a date on this customer’s sofa.
What a buyer can check this week
Anyone who has paid Micasa and has no delivery date should ask the branch, in writing, for a shipping date or a refund, and should keep the card statement. A charge that was taken twice is a card dispute as well as a shop dispute. The company’s promise is that the new capital stops the supplier freeze. Customers will believe it when the furniture arrives, not when the press release does.
The wider Migros story is a different vote, about folding ten cooperatives into one. That ballot has not been held. Micasa is already outside it. What Monday shows is the cost of the exit: a chain that had to invent its own systems, ran short of cash for the people who make the sofas, and has now sold itself again to find the money. Seventy jobs and four shops are the price of the rescue. A paid invoice with no table behind it is the part the rescue has not yet finished.