Kate Millar has a loyal following for her sewing classes.
“People come in weekly, daily — I’ve got a lady that now calls when she’s got extra time and runs in,” the Plainfield resident said.
While her Classic Sewing has been in business for over a decade, she only started teaching at her booth at Painted Tree Boutiques on Route 59 in 2023 after the Washington Street building where she was previously located was sold.
“This is my job. I’m here from 10:30 in the morning until eight o’clock at night,” Millar said. “… I do it because I love doing it. Very few people get to do what they love to do.”
But last week, she received a call from clients who told her they were not allowed into the building. Painted Tree, a national chain that provided leased space for retail and home decor vendors, closed all of its stores effective April 14.
Millar knew Painted Tree was in financial trouble — she had not been paid by the company since January and is owed “thousands” of dollars, she said. But the news still surprised her.
“I’m just gonna wait for God,” she said as she packed up her items last week. “I’m not a person who panics so I’m sure this means something else great is out there.”
The company announced it was closing all of its locations — four of which are located in Illinois — and filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Vendors have until April 24 to remove their items from the store.
In a statement, the company wrote that rising costs, “shifting market conditions and the evolving nature of how people shop” contributed to the closure.
“They owe a lot of people, including me, a lot of money,” said Mary Ann Waldorf, a vendor with shops at Painted Tree stores in Naperville, Kildeer and Bloomingdale.
The company, which started as a vintage market in Bryant, Arkansas, in 2015, allowed artisans and entrepreneurs to rent space in the store to sell and promote their merchandise. Vendors at the Naperville location, which opened in 2020, sold everything from plants and cake mixes to women’s clothing and paintings.
With the abrupt closure, employees and small business owners alike have been left scrambling, they said. Some are wondering where they will go next or if they will receive a final paycheck from the company.
“It’s shocking. I knew the company was in trouble, but not to this extent. I was just dumbfounded,” said a 70-year-old Painted Tree employee, who declined to give her name because she fears company retaliation.
The employee said she noticed problems starting in about September, when the company switched from writing checks to vendors to using an online billing system.
“Money was disappearing from vendors’ accounts and they were taking more rent money than they should and they weren’t getting paid for their sales — some people to the tunes of thousands of dollars — and it never got corrected,” she said. “There’s still people waiting for their money and they’ll never see it because now they filed Chapter 7 (bankruptcy).”
Even in the last few weeks, the company was allowing people to open new booths.
“We’ve had some people that just moved in within the last week or two, had grand openings … and now they’re in here ripping their booth apart … so they never even got one check,” the employee said.
A spokesperson for Painted Tree Boutiques did not respond to questions about how the company charged its vendors or if vendors would be paid.
Waldorf, who had been at the Naperville store since it opened, said she was negotiating her leases on April 13 and planning to bring in more items for her booths. The following day, she received a call to come in and collect her belongings.
She estimates she is owed several thousand dollars, but she is not hopeful she’ll ever see the money.
“There was a big change this past year and they always made mistakes in their favor, like double charging you on a booth and everything was different,” Waldorf said. “You could never talk to anybody. You could only submit a case and then you’d submit a case and they say, ‘Oh, we got your case. We’re working on it,’ but they never did.”
She also noted that around the same time the company changed its billing system, it became less transparent about what vendors owed.
“Painted Tree always took the rent first and then paid you for your sales, and it was fine. It always worked out. We always knew where we stood. If we were short on the rent, we wrote a check or paid (the) amount charged,” Waldorf said. “You always dealt with your own management and it was honest and really good. Then it was dishonest because you couldn’t talk to anybody. The store management didn’t even know what they charged you on rent.”
Dennis Campbell said his wife Kathy, who sold items like ornate clocks, jewelry boxes and paintings, had a similar experience. For the past five months, the company was overcharging her $94 a month.
“They kept saying it was a computer mistake or an accounting mistake. Nobody would ever come back to her with an excellent explanation, but it was the same $94 a month, so she’s overpaying,” said Campbell, noting his wife is owed about a thousand dollars.
While the pair said they will be OK financially, their daughter Amy Campbell said her mother was “devastated” when she found out about the closure.
“It was so out of the blue,” she said as she helped dismantle her mother’s stall. “She read me the email and said, ‘What are we going to do?’”
cstein@chicagotribune.com
