Jaime Pine perused the 100,000-square-foot Deerfield Wonder store last Sunday armed with a $75 gift card, unaware that just hours later the children’s mega-retailer would abruptly close.
When she learned the news the next day, the Highland Park resident remembered the lone checkout clerk and “now hiring” sign in the window. She also thought about the $58 decorative tin she didn’t buy.
“How could they just close like that with no warning?” said Pine, 32, a stay-at-home mom. “I could just kick myself that I didn’t buy that tin. My sister-in-law has store credit she hadn’t used too.”
Less than four months ago, the children’s mega-store opened with fanfare and high expectations — first-year sales were projected to be $33 million, and with Deerfield as its headquarters, the company had planned to open 19 more stores in the next five years. Now village residents and officials are left wondering how such a promising venture fell so far, so fast.
“I’m very sad, is really what I have to say about it,” said Deerfield Mayor Harriet Rosenthal. “It’s just a shame. It’s a fabulous concept and a beautiful store.”
Rosenthal can afford to be sympathetic. Although the village offered an economic incentive package to lure Wonder, the store would have had to exceed $25 million in annual sales to get any tax breaks. Still, its demise means unrealized sales tax revenue for the village, and a site that had been vacant for more than five years will again sit unused.
On Monday, the company sent out a four-paragraph statement that it was closing to undertake a financial restructuring.
“I am hopeful for the future of Wonder and remain dedicated to ensuring that Wonder will indeed see another day,” said founder and Chairman Shane Christensen of Lake Forest.
Victoria Street, executive director of the Deerfield, Bannockburn and Riverwoods Chamber of Commerce, said more than a dozen residents called the chamber in the days after the store’s closing.
“People weren’t angry — more surprised,” Street said. “A couple of people had booked parties there.”
But Deerfield Trustee Bob Benton said Wonder’s closing wasn’t a complete surprise.
Two months ago, contractors filed liens against the company seeking more than $600,000 they said they were owed for work done. Lovering Electric Co. in Highland Park filed suit Feb. 2, saying it was owed nearly $70,000 for work as a subcontractor.
“When I heard they were not able to pay their contractors, it made me think they were not in the best of health, and some said it was not very crowded,” Benton said. “But my thought at the time was to give them time.”
Even before the store opened, Wonder showed signs of trouble. When a major investor bowed out last year, Wonder officials delayed the store’s opening by about 10 months.
When it finally opened on a cold, drizzly October morning, it drew a crowd waiting outside to experience the “wonder” of the children’s mega-store — a one-stop shop of goods for infants and tots up to age 7. Described as a cross between Ikea and Whole Foods, the warehouse-size “boutique” included a children’s car test track, 100 varieties of strollers, a half-acre play area and 10 classrooms.
But as the months wore on, the crowds didn’t return. Not even on Black Friday, typically the busiest shopping day of the year. At the time, Christensen said he was unfazed because Wonder’s typical customer is “not someone who is always going out looking for that lowest price.”
Deerfield resident Beth Linderman disagrees.
“A lot of people were saying, ‘It’s so expensive — how is it going to last?'” said Linderman, 31. “Just because this is an affluent community doesn’t mean people aren’t looking for good deals.”
When Northbrook’s Hedy Merel, 61, took her 3-year-old grandson to the store’s play area, she said there were few shoppers and a lot of open space where there could’ve been more products. She had heard rumors the store was foundering but hoped it would catch on.
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“It was a beautiful store, and they made everything so appealing. It was a new concept for the North Shore, and I thought people would gravitate to it,” Merel said.
The concept of applying a big-box mentality to a children’s store may be what contributed to its demise, said Richard Wilson, associate director of the Kellogg Center for Global Marketing Practice in Evanston.
If customers are looking for “high-touch” products like strollers and want to test them out, they might stop by specialty stores, but they don’t need to go there for replenishment supplies such as diapers, Wilson said. For those items, customers tend to shop at stores like Target, where they can buy groceries too.
Or they shop online, said Wilson, whose recent article,” Why Mobile Shoppers Want Real-World Stores,” is posted on Bloomberg’s website.
“My hypothesis is a big chunk of (Wonder’s) assortment was not the high-touch experience,” Wilson said. “They lost business to the Internet on replenishment products.”