Comet, the British electrical retailer that collapsed into liquidation in 2012, returned on 9 November 2026 as an online-only marketplace, relaunched by entrepreneur Cas Paton with a reported £10 million investment.
According to WalesOnline, the revived brand will sell more than one million products from 2,500 sellers at www.comet.co.uk, spanning televisions, washing machines, mobiles and computers. Paton, 42, has restored the black and orange livery familiar to generations of shoppers, rejecting a later rebrand he believes severed the chain's connection with working-class customers.
What the Comet relaunch tells us about retail and class memory
There is a reason nostalgia sells. The Comet that Paton remembers, the Trafford Park store he visited as a boy with his late father Nigel, was a space where technology felt aspirational precisely because it was out of reach. His account is revealing about what has been lost in the shift from high street to platform, and about who has been left behind in that transition.
'I remember being a very young boy and going into Comet and just being so excited by the potential of all this new technology,' Paton said. 'Whether it was the TVs or the electronics, these were things you aspired to own. It's that excitement of going into the store that I don't think has ever really been recreated.'
The collapse of Comet in 2012, as Metro reports, followed severe financial losses, and it destroyed thousands of jobs concentrated in towns where retail work was often one of the few stable options available to working-class communities, including disabled workers and those with caring responsibilities for whom shift-based shop employment offered routes the gig economy has since eroded. The relaunch, by contrast, creates no such floor of employment. It is an online marketplace that sells no stock of its own.
A marketplace without workers, a brand without stores
Paton is candid about the model. 'Every sale that's made on Comet is a sale for another retailer. We're a friend of the retailers,' he said. 'We're here to attract customers, build trust and give customers choice.'
There is little to fault in the sentiment, and much to interrogate in the structure. Platform capitalism extracts value from circulation rather than production: the brand accumulates trust and nostalgia, while the labour, the warehousing, the delivery work and the risk sit with 2,500 third-party sellers and their precariously contracted staff. Brit Brief notes that the relaunched Comet carries more than a million electrical products from launch, all supplied by these sellers. The couriers who move those parcels, disproportionately migrants and racialised workers in UK logistics, remain outside the brand's warm orange glow.
Paton frames the timing as a service to squeezed households. 'The market is really tough. Money is really tight,' he said. 'But people still need a kettle. They still need a toaster. They still want a TV. If we can help people save money by bringing better choice from a reputable, long-standing brand that has nostalgia and trust, I think it's a great win.'
Amid a cost-of-living crisis driven by profiteering energy firms and landlordism, the promise of cheaper toasters is not nothing. But we should be clear-eyed that 'choice' within a marketplace is not the same as power over the market.
The myth of the heroic founder
The relaunch narrative leans heavily on Paton's biography: the paper round, the £79.99 first website, the Royal Navy, law at Bournemouth University, the sale of his house to fund OnBuy. By his third year at university he had 27 staff, and OnBuy, now reportedly worth £250 million, grew from £100,000 a month in revenue to £10 million a month within three years.
'I basically went from being a relatively high-performing income person to completely broke to get OnBuy off the ground,' Paton said. 'It was like going all-in on a poker game.'
On his office wall hangs a picture of a shoal of fish swimming one way, with a single fish heading the other, captioned: 'What if everyone else is wrong?' It is a compelling image, and it is also the founding myth of an entrepreneurial individualism that our media and universities reproduce uncritically: the lone visionary against the doubters. A venture capital firm told him in 2017 it would be surprised if OnBuy reached £1 million in annual sales; the same person later messaged to admit regret. The story flatters capital's capacity to misjudge, but it leaves untouched the question of who can afford to go 'all-in' in the first place, and who never gets the £80 to build a website.
Paton believes Comet could eventually be worth between £250 million and £500 million. He is also exploring click-and-collect partnerships that, as he put it, 'might put Comet's name back on a few buildings'. Whether those buildings house secure jobs or merely collection lockers staffed on zero-hours contracts will be the real measure of the revival.
Questions readers are asking about Comet's return
When did Comet collapse and when did it return?
Comet, founded in 1933, went into liquidation in 2012. The brand relaunched online on 9 November 2026, exactly 14 years after its collapse.
Will the new Comet have physical stores?
Not for now. The relaunched Comet is online-only, though Paton said he is exploring click-and-collect partnerships that could return the name to high street buildings.
Who owns Comet now?
Entrepreneur Cas Paton, founder of the OnBuy marketplace, bought the brand and has invested £10 million in the relaunch.
How many products does the new Comet sell?
The site offers more than one million products from 2,500 sellers, covering electricals only, with no furniture or clothing.