Southern Season Sold at Auction

Calvert Retail, a Delaware company that owns eight kitchenware stores, was the sole bidder in a bankruptcy sale for Southern Season in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Calvert came in with a $3.5 million bid, according to an article in The News & Observer. A federal judge approved the sale Friday afternoon and the deal was being expedited to close on Monday.

“We are very close to zero cash. We don’t have enough cash to operate next week if this doesn’t close,” John Fioretti, the court approved chief restructuring officer for Southern Season, told the newspaper.

According to reports, Calvert Retail owns six Kitchen & Company stores from South Carolina to New Hampshire. It also owns two Reading China & Glass stores in eastern Pennsylvania. Calvert is buying Southern Season’s flagship store in Chapel Hill, its website, trade names and intellectual property. The Taste of Southern Season stores in Raleigh and Asheville, and Charleston, S.C., will close. There are no immediate plans for changes at the Chapel Hill store.

At 60,000 square feet, Southern Season’s Chapel Hill store is significantly larger than Calvert Retail’s stores, which average between 10,000 and 20,000 square feet.

“It was only two weeks ago that our company understood the sale was possible,” Calvert Retail owner Eric Brinsfield said in a press release. “Right now, we are looking forward to learning and understanding everything that makes Southern Season so special in this market.”

Brinsfield added that Southern Season’s well-known name and synergy with its business make it an attractive purchase. “As a company, we have always admired Southern Season as a leading brand. We were monitoring the situation closely and hoping to get involved with such a great legacy,” he said in the statement. “A large percentage of what Southern Season sells is directly in line with what our stores sell.”

The newspaper report said Southern Season was started in 1975 and eventually became a $30 million retail and mail-order business and an anchor tenant at Chapel Hill’s University Place mall. However, it never recovered after the 2008 recession and was bought in 2011 by TC Capital Fund, which is led by Chapel Hill entrepreneur Clay Hamner.

Hamner, who became the company’s CEO, tried to replicate the success of the Chapel Hill store with its restaurant and cooking school in Richmond, Va., and outside Charleston, S.C. Those two locations closed earlier this year. Dave Herman, president and chief operating officer, recently replaced Hamner as CEO.

The company filed for bankruptcy in late June. At that time, court filings said it had $9.8 million in assets, including $3.6 million in inventory, and $18.3 million in liabilities.