Children's Place to close 300 stores by end of 2021

The Children’s Place will close nearly a third of its stores by the end 2021, the specialty apparel retailer announced recently in revealing its first quarter 2020 results.

The company said it plans to close 200 stores in 2020, and another 100 in 2021. The Children’s Place had 920 stores at the end of the first quarter of this year.

The locations that will be closed were not identified.

The Children’s Place has seven stores in Southwestern Pennsylvania. They are located at Monroeville Mall, Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills, Waterworks, The Waterfront, South Hills Village, The Mall at Robinson and Beaver Valley Mall.

Jane Elfers, president and chief executive officer, said flexibility in lease terms is enabling it to accelerate store closures without financial penalty.

“This initiative will greatly reduce our reliance on our brick-and-mortar channel, and we are targeting our mall-based, brick-and-mortar portfolio to represent less than 25% of our revenue entering fiscal 2022,” she said.

The retailer had previously closed 275 stores since beginning an “optimization initiative” in 2013.

The company closed its stores in the United States and Canada on March 18 because of the covid-19 pandemic. It started reopening stores in 10 states on May 19; as of June 8, 61 stores were open to the public in the United States and Canada.

The company plans to have most of its stores open by July 1, Elfers said.

Elfers said that demand for its children’s clothing continued to surge, with online demand up 300% while about 95% of its stores were closed.

Despite the increase in online sales, The Children’s Place reported its net sales in the first quarter decreased 38.1% from the first quarter of 2019, from $412.4 million to $255.2 million. It attributed the decrease primarily to its stores being closed because of the pandemic.

“We believe that our strong digital foundation, coupled with the rapidly changing shopping patterns of our consumer, partly due to the covid-19 pandemic, our strong value proposition and our core, digital-savvy, millennial customer, will result in the continued acceleration of our digital revenue,” Elfers said.