No more stoles covered with peacock feathers and silk taffeta morning glories. No more evening dresses crafted from unusual combinations of sparkling metal and wool–at least for now.
Maria Pinto, one of Chicago’s premier designers, has closed her 11-year-old eveningwear business. In a letter to retail customers, Pinto said she was closing Maria Pinto Designs, effective Jan. 18.
She had no choice but to close, Pinto wrote, because the company “suffered a series of setbacks from which we were unable to bounce back, including unexpectedly large losses on accounts receivables, embezzlement by a trusted employee and a contracting economy.”
The final blow, Pinto says, was the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, which threw a scare into the nation’s merchants. New orders slowed dramatically at the same time that many pending orders were being canceled by rattled retailers.
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Despite the difficult decision to let her employees go, Pinto is promising to get back into the game, possibly as soon as six months from now.
“The best is yet to come. I’m really excited about this kind of change,” she said Friday. “I want to continue on the path but do it differently. You learn a lot over 11 years. You learn what to add and subtract.”
For now, Pinto is enjoying some personal time, taking trips to sunny spots and going for long walks, activities she has neglected since starting her own design business. She also is pausing to reflect on how the world has changed since Sept. 11, trying to figure out what dressing up is about in 2002.
Pinto’s fans needn’t worry. Her new company, which may involve partners, will still be dedicated to making “the most beautifully crafted apparel,” she says.
For those who are thinking this might be an opportunity to load up on her current designs at bargain prices, forget it. There won’t be a final sample sale. The clothes she has left will simply “go to clothes heaven,” she says.
Receipts wanted: When Kmart Corp. filed for bankruptcy protection Jan. 22, the giant discounter reassured customers that its return policy wasn’t affected by the Chapter 11 filing. We printed that, as did lots of other newspapers around the country.
What Kmart didn’t say was that its return policy had changed Jan. 14, requiring customers to have a receipt for anything they wanted to return or exchange.
It was the new, more restrictive, policy that wasn’t changing.
Needless to say, some customers who had lost their receipts were unpleasantly surprised when they showed up at Kmart last week as the store had always accepted their returns before, giving them the lowest price for their item in the past 12 weeks.
A Kmart spokeswoman says the change was made to keep Kmart “competitive in the marketplace.” The fact the change came so close to the Chapter 11 filing is merely a “coincidence,” she adds.
Kmart says its competitors have similar return policies. “In a lot of instances, we were getting a lot of merchandise returned to our store from competitors because they weren’t accepting any returns or exchanges without a receipt,” the spokeswoman said.
So let’s be clear. Kmart’s new, unchanged return policy is this: Receipts are required for returns or exchanges within 90 days for a full refund.
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