Retail Roundup: Papyrus stationery chain to close all stores nationwide

The owner of the Papyrus chain of stationery, greeting card and gift stores will close all its shops in North America, including its only Long Island location — in Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City, the company announced.

The closings of the 254 specialty stores will affect about 1,400 employees, Dominique Schurman, chief executive of Schurman Retail Group, said in a statement. Most of the stores will close in the next four to six weeks. 

The Papyrus website says that all full-priced merchandise is being discounted by 20% and all sales are final.

The Roosevelt Field store opened in October 1996 and occupies 1,051 square feet in the mall, said a spokeswoman for Simon Property Group Inc., the Indianapolis-based owner of the mall.

Papyrus was founded by Dominique Schurman’s parents, Marcel and Margrit Schurman, in 1950.

Schurman Retail Group, which is based in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, now licenses the Papyrus brand from American Greetings Corp.

“American Greetings, owner of the Papyrus brand, has grown the business since acquiring it in 2009 into one of the most recognizable greeting cards brands in the industry,” said Patrice Molnar, spokeswoman for Cleveland-based American Greetings.

Schurman Retail Group also licenses the American Greetings brand name for some of its stores. Neither Molnar nor a Schurman Retail Group spokesman could immediately give a breakdown of how many of the closing stores are Papyrus versus American Greetings.

Papyrus brand cards and products will continue to be sold in more than 20,000 stores in the United States and Canada, including Target, Kroger, Whole Foods and Rite Aid, Molnar said.

Schurman Retail Group did not provide more detail about the store closings beyond the statement it issued, but the greeting card industry has been challenged by changing consumer preferences for years.

Consumers are increasingly sending their well wishes for birthdays, Christmas and other occasions electronically through email, text messaging, social media and digital greeting cards, instead of using paper cards.

The number of paper greeting cards sent via first-class mail between 2010 and 2018 fell 35% to 1.9 billion, according to the U.S. Postal Service’s Household Diary Study.

There was a nearly 27% decline in the amount of retail space occupied by greeting card stores between 2014 and 2019, according to the CoStar Group, a Washington, D.C.-based provider of commercial real estate data.

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.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

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.