Some Thoughts on JoAnn Stores and Their Most Recent Bankruptcy Filing

Hi everyone! I don’t normally talk about stores or brands and their business dealings, but I feel like I need to talk about JoAnn’s most recent bankruptcy filing.

In 2024, JoAnn filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I used to mention the JoAnn store many times in my sewing posts, but I stopped because I started to not shop there for fabric or DIY supplies. There were several reasons for this, but one of them is because the closest store to where I live became to hard to me to travel to. Despite my slowing interest in shopping at JoAnn, I also didn’t like the fabric selection they had. The quality wasn’t as good as it once was, the selection of designs was not in my taste, and it was hard to find all the new sewing patterns there. Sadly, the employees didn’t stock the shelves as well as they had been in previous years.

The thing was, even though JoAnn filed for bankruptcy in 2024, I saw this at least seven years earlier. So, it didn’t surprise me that they filed for bankruptcy. What did surprise me was when JoAnn filed for bankruptcy last week.

I found out about this when I was browsing YouTube videos. I was surprised when I saw JoAnn was closing a store. Even though I watch and pay attention to the news, I didn’t know JoAnn was closing stores. I thought they were coming out of bankruptcy and building the company back! Instead, they weren’t. After doing some digging, I discovered that JoAnn had filed for bankruptcy again in less than a year.

In the articles I read, the company looks like it is in pretty bad shape. It is looking for a buyer and has one, but the buyer intends on closing all stores, selling all the assets, and JoAnn will be no more. At the time of the publishing of this post, the company is not committed to the buyer.

To be honest, I’m really sad and disappointed with the way JoAnn has been operating. I had to travel longer distances to find a store that was better run than the one closest to where I live. If I wanted a sewing pattern that was new and was part of their pattern sales, I needed to go farther and farther away from where I live to obtain it. Now, I’m at the point when I just shop for them online. It’s cheeper and less time consuming to do this. Same thing goes for fabric. The problem is I didn’t see this as regularly in the other JoAnn stores than I did with my own. I thought it was the management and the area where it is located. Now I wonder if it was more cooperate than the manager of that specific store.

For me, this has been interesting to watch. I don’t know what this means about sewing and crafting, but I know that there are many sewing and crafting hobbyists that are like me. We shop for sewing patterns by indi sewing pattern companies. We shop for fabrics from small businesses. And we do it all online or, if you are lucky enough, in person. This has changed way of shopping for what we need. We no longer need to buy these things from a chain store with many locations around the country. Instead, these things from small businesses. And, above all else, the quality is usually much better than at the chain stores!

Sadly, I don’t know what will come in the future for chain stores like JoAnn. I don’t know if they will be able to keep up with the customer demands for better quality products for a certain price. It is something I am watching closely.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!