early 1980s was fought with a revamp of the stores and the selling of goods with higher profit margins. The company closed its only overseas store, in Dublin, Ireland, during this time (although there was a rapidly aborted re-entry in 1996 via a franchise store in Dublin's Jervis Centre). In 1985, the first overseas franchise store opened in Gibraltar. Such stores, not directly owned by the BHS company itself, have operated over Europe and the Middle East. In 1986, BHS merged with Habitat and Mothercare to form Storehouse plc. Soon afterwards, the British Home Stores registered company name and branding across its shops was replaced with "BhS" (later "Bhs", and since reverted to the all-caps "BHS", which the company used in addition to the full British Home Stores name prior to the full rebrand) and a new corporate logo. The exception was in stores that displayed a "historic" fascia, such as that in Edinburgh's Princes Street, which continued to feature the British Home Stores name in its original Roman type etched into the granite shop front. British Home Stores, like many other major retailers, followed a trend of opening stores at out-of-town locations since the 1980s. One of these was the two-level store at Merry Hill Shopping Centre in the West Midlands (which formed part of an Enterprise Zone). This store opened on 14 November 1989, ultimately replacing the store in nearby Dudley, which closed in June 1990 after a directly related sharp fall in turnover. The nearby West Bromwich store closed around the same time, its fortunes also affected by the Merry Hill development and smaller developments around nearby Oldbury, which had begun with the SavaCentre hypermarket in 1980. Takeover by Philip Green In the mid-1990s, the brand saw a further reinvention under guidance from retail design house '20:20'. The new look was showcased with the launch of the "millennium concept" shopfit, initially at the Grafton Centre, Cambridge during 1995. With its softer Bhs "signature" logo and warm interior lighting, the concept attempted with varying degrees of success to meet the needs of the modern, more sophisticated shopper. During the late 1990s, the stores which formed Storehouse Plc fell on hard times; BHS and Mothercare were the worst affected. Following a number of years of tough trading, Philip Green bought BHS from Storehouse Plc in May 2000 for £200 million. He then changed the company from public (Plc) to