Retail Roundup: Clothing and accessories store Charming Charlie returning to LI
A Charming Charlie store in 2017, before all the stores, including two on Long Island, closed. Credit: Charming Charlie
Charming Charlie is headed back to Long Island.
The women’s clothing and accessories retailer is opening new stores, after the closing of all 261 of its locations, a bankruptcy filing and the sale of its intellectual property in 2019.
A Long Island store is scheduled to open April 9 at Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, but that is dependent on city and state mandates around the COVID-19 pandemic, said Steve Lovell, president of Charming Charlie.
On Nov. 23, the Town of Hempstead Industrial Development Agency approved a lease agreement between Charming Charlie and the mall.
The IDA holds title to the mall because the property, at 2034 Green Acres Rd., operates under a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement the agency approved in 2015, so the mall’s owner, Santa Monica, California-based real estate investment trust Macerich Co., must get the IDA’s approval for all tenant leases.
The new LI Charming Charliewill be 6,416 square feet in size and employ four full-time and 12 part-time workers, Fred Parola, executive director of the IDA, said during the agency's board meeting Nov. 23.
Founded in 2004, Houston-based Charming Charlie Holdings Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2019, its second bankruptcy filing in two years.
A Charming Charlie store in 2017. Credit: Charming Charlie
The 261 stores it closed included two on Long Island — in The Gallery at Westbury Plaza in Garden City and the Westfield South Shore mall in Bay Shore.
Real estate investment firm CJS Group LP, which is owned by Charming Charlie founder Charlie Chanaratsopon, submitted a winning bid of $1.125 million for the retailer’s intellectual property in a bankruptcy auction in September 2019.
The first Charming Charlie store under CJS ownership opened in September, in Atlanta.
"Under the leadership of Steve Lovell, Charming Charlie plans to roll out additional retail locations in markets across the U.S. over late 2020 and early 2021 respectively. Since the COVID-19 crisis, the brand delayed all openings originally slated for March 2020," the retailer said in a statement in September.
There are now six Charming Charlie stores, none of which is in New York State.
Retail Roundup is a column about major retail news on Long Island — store openings, closings, expansions, acquisitions, etc. — that is published online and in the Monday paper. To read more of these columns, click here. If you have news to share, please send an email to Newsday reporter Tory N. Parrish at tory.parrish@newsday.com.
Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.
New hope for justice Theresa Cerney's killing is one of at least 66 cases of dead women being reviewed by Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney's new cold case unit. NewsdayTV's Shari Einhorn and Newsday investigative reporter Sandra Peddie have this exclusive story.
