Paid an online shop that has since gone bust? You get up to 30 days to file a claim
Blissfulbreeze, which ran the e-commerce for the Cristina brands, was declared insolvent by the Vila Nova de Gaia commercial court on 11 August and is heading for liquidation. Anyone who had already paid becomes an ordinary creditor, with a deadline that starts at the judgment.
The company behind the online shop for the Cristina, Love Cristina and Daily Cristina labels has gone under. Blissfulbreeze was declared insolvent on 11 August by the commercial court in Vila Nova de Gaia and is now heading into liquidation, with Santander, Vodafone and Amor Ponto, Cristina Ferreira’s own company, among the creditors. The presenter has said her commercial relationship with Blissfulbreeze covered only the production and sale of footwear collections, and that the contract ended in 2025.
The instructive part is not the name over the door. It is that the shop stayed online for weeks after the judgment, still selling, with discounts reaching 80% in early September. An aggressive sale on a site nobody knows is insolvent is precisely the moment when people pay without suspecting a thing.
What happens to money already paid
The instant insolvency is declared, anyone who paid and never received stops being a customer and becomes a creditor. In almost every case an ordinary one, which is the bottom rung of the queue behind secured and preferential claims. If the estate does not stretch to everyone, and it usually does not, a consumer gets a fraction or gets nothing.
That is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument for moving quickly.
The deadline, and how to meet it
The judgment declaring insolvency sets a deadline of up to 30 days for creditors to file their claims. The claim goes to the insolvency administrator at the address given in the public notice, by registered post or electronically. There is no fee and no requirement to instruct a lawyer.
Gather everything that evidences the purchase: the invoice or receipt, proof of payment, the order number, any email exchange with the shop. State the principal and, where relevant, the interest. Miss the deadline and a claim can still be recognised through a later verification procedure, but court costs apply by then and there is usually less left to share.
Where do the notice, the administrator’s name and the deadline live? On Citius, the public portal where Portuguese courts publish insolvency proceedings. Search the company name rather than the brand, which is the tedious part: the entity that issues the invoices is rarely called what the shop is called.
What to try first
If you paid by card and the goods never arrived, it is worth asking your bank about a chargeback through the card scheme. It is neither automatic nor always available, and the clocks run from the purchase date, so an early question beats a well-drafted one. MB Way and bank transfers carry no equivalent mechanism.
The general rules of buying online still apply: use a card with sellers you do not know, keep the order confirmation, and treat unusually deep discounts on an established brand as information rather than luck. It is the same pattern visible in other recent collapses, from a Cascais clinic that shut without warning to Delta’s rescue of Mocoffee, where the gap between losing everything and recovering something came down to how fast somebody went and read the paperwork.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: Joseolgon / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
