Judge Stacey Meisel of the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey approved Eddie Bauer LLC's liquidating Chapter 11 plan at a combined disclosure-statement and confirmation hearing Thursday — 60 days after the February 9 petition. [1] The operator went to wind-down rather than sale, Judge Meisel ruled, because "that's the result of the market and nothing else." The March 6 auction drew zero qualified bids; Hilco Merchant Resources and SB360 Capital Partners with Gordon Brothers were already conducting store-closing sales at all 175 North American locations. [2]

The paper's Monday countdown stood at twelve days. Tuesday is nine. The April 30 termination deadline holds for all 175 US and Canadian locations, and 2,200 employees will be out by Thursday of next week. The e-commerce operation, run under a separate entity called Outdoor 5 LLC, survives; the physical retail operation does not. This is the third Eddie Bauer Chapter 11 since 2003. The store count has fallen from approximately 600 at peak to the 175 operating locations at the petition date, with 49 additional stores already closed through lease non-renewals in late 2025. [3]

What closes with Eddie Bauer is a corner of the specialty-retail market — mid-price outdoor apparel, national mall presence, 100-year-old brand equity — that Francesca's vacated earlier this year at roughly 400 locations. The liquidation dynamics the trade press names are tariff pressure, mall-traffic decline, and the shift of outdoor spending to pure-digital players. The April 30 date is the calendar's version of those dynamics.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco