Clothing Warehouse will close at the end of this month

Soon, passersby will no longer get to see the vibrant and colorful displays in the window of The Clothing Warehouse on Franklin Street.

The vintage store is currently having a going-out-of-business sale and will close its doors by April 30.

“It is unfortunate that it wasn’t more profitable, but that is the way it works sometimes,” said Rob Ball, the owner of the vintage clothing store.

The Clothing Warehouse is a chain of national stores with the main branch in Atlanta. The Chapel Hill branch opened in 2009.

Ball recently moved from Charlotte to Cleveland, Ohio, and said it was just too difficult to keep up with the store due to the distance.

He said the decision to close the clothing store was made about four months ago.

“Not enough people come to downtown Chapel Hill to shop,” he said. “People from Carrboro or Durham; they don’t come to shop. They come to eat and drink. So business isn’t good consistently throughout the year.”

Ball said he will not open another store of the Clothing Warehouse.

SunPocket Management LLC owns the building where the store is located. Brian Pittman, a senior partner at the financial consulting firm, said it is too soon to know what will take the Clothing Warehouse’s place in the building.

“They’ve been great to have there,” Pittman said of the vintage store.

For the next business at the location, Pittman said he wants something unique to move in.

“Ideally, something like the Clothing Warehouse or something Franklin Street doesn’t currently offer, but I’m not really sure what that will be,” he said.

Pittman said that construction work will be done on the front of the building once The Clothing Warehouse closes. They will be doing work on the front of the building to create more access to the space upstairs above the store.

The second floor has no access to the front of the building currently, so the stairs will be wrapped around to have access in the back of the building and on Franklin Street, Pittman said.

Chapel Hill resident Lydia Davis said she has shopped at The Clothing Warehouse previously but not recently. Davis said the closing of the vintage store is sad because it didn’t seem like it was in Chapel Hill for very long.

She said it reminded her of the closing of Time After Time, a vintage clothing store on Franklin Street that closed in 2014 after 33 years in business.

She said she and her family also get their vintage fix at Rumors Boutique, another vintage and thrift clothing store in Chapel Hill.

“There’s still lots of stores that we currently go to,” Davis said. “Rumors is the one that is kind of taking the place.”

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