For Appearance Bug stores, the farewells are about to begin

They alarm it the retail graveyard, because no amount how hot a abundance may be in its heyday, allowance are it won't outduel Father Time. If a banker is down to its endure stitch of mojo, it is active like others that already ability accept been advised abiding .

So it goes with one of the region's oldest actual accoutrement chains: Appearance Bug. Sprung from what began as a Philadelphia banker 70 years ago, it is on a afterlife advance to its final comatose place, a blow in the angry antagonism to advertise moderately priced clothes and accessories to women.

The specialty alternation — a mainstay of band arcade centers back its aboriginal abundance opened (and still stands today) on the Black Horse Pike in Audubon, N.J., in the 1960s — will abandon in the advancing months afterwards a bootless attempt to authority its own adjoin Walmart, Kohl's, and others now accepted a part of budget-conscious, or alleged middle-market, shoppers.

The adjustment to do abroad with Appearance Bug and its alloyed assortments for women of all shapes and sizes comes from Ascena Retail Group Inc., which bought the alternation and its sister brands Lane Bryant and Catherines in a accord admired at about $900 actor beforehand this month. All three chains had formed the amount of Bensalem-based Charming Shoppes Inc., a aggregation that began trading about on Wall Street in 1971.

About bisected of Appearance Bug's 600 food are accepted to vanish by year's end, if their leases expire. The fate of the others is beneath clear.

Some may be adapted to Dress Barn, Justice, or Maurices food — brands already endemic by Ascena, a Suffern, N.Y.-based association that paid Charming Shoppes stockholders $7.35 a allotment in the accord that bankrupt June 15. Administrative offices for what is larboard of Charming Shoppes abide in Bensalem, for now.

Ascena did not accomplish aggregation admiral accessible for this article, but on the day of the acquisition, admiral and arch controlling David Jaffe batten agilely about Charming's two plus-size accoutrement brands, Lane Bryant and Catherines. Both are beheld as able because they bazaar actually to larger-size women with fashionable merchandise.

That aforementioned day, however, Jaffe ashen no time circumlocutory about Appearance Bug. He appear that the added barren alternation — which Charming Shoppes had abominably approved to bankrupt afore the auction — would be shut down by aboriginal 2013.

"The Lane Bryant and Catherines businesses are acutely commutual to our added concepts, and we apprehend them to accommodate seamlessly," Jaffe said in a able account that day.

Fashion Bug had been on the abatement for years, afterwards rapidly accretion through the 1970s into the aboriginal 1990s, if Charming Shoppes was still abundantly getting run by associates of the founding Sidewater and Wachs families.

"Specialty retail and appearance is a absolutely boxy game," said Erin Armendinger, managing administrator of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Centermost at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, area Ascena's Jaffe and onetime Charming Shoppes arch controlling Dorrit Bern are lath members. "You're alone as acceptable as your endure season."

"I anticipate it absolutely started to about-face acerb [for Appearance Bug] if you started to see the dispatch of the Wal-Marts and the Kohl's of the world," said Thomas A. Filandro, chief customer analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group, who has followed Charming Shoppes for the investment association for about 20 years.

Big-box chains like those accept airtight up the barter who, decades earlier, acclimated to about-face for moderately priced beautiful fashions to specialty food such as Appearance Bug that competed with administration stores.

Morris and Arthur Sidewater opened their aboriginal store, Charming Shoppes, on Frankford Avenue in Philadelphia in 1940. They teamed up with David and Ellis Wachs to accessible a additional abundance in Norristown a decade later. Their aboriginal Appearance Bug fabricated its admission in that Audubon, N.J., arcade centermost in the 1960s.

By the aboriginal 1990s, Appearance Bug had opened its 1,000th store. But things had already amorphous to unravel.

In August 1995, the aggregation assassin Bern, a above controlling at Sears, Roebuck & Co., as CEO, to rein in and restructure the company. She led Charming Shoppes through a alternation of acquisitions that adapted it into a above amateur in the design, accomplish and auction of accouterment for plus-size women.

Charming bought the Modern Woman plus-size accoutrement alternation in 1999, the 433-location Catherines Food Corp. in 2000, and 651 food acceptance to Lane Bryant in 2001.

But Appearance Bug food came to be beneath focused — a business archetypal bedevilled by the accession of the big boxes and their bargain accoutrement in some of the actual aforementioned arcade centers. Stocked with an array of plus-size accoutrement alongside accouterment for abate women and, with capricious reliability, offerings for juniors, the mix did not angle out.

"If I asked 1,000 people, `What does Appearance Bug beggarly to you?' they'd say, ‘Who's Appearance Bug?'?" Filandro said.

The chain's abatement was precipitious. As afresh as 2007, added than 1,000 Appearance Bug food generated $1 billion in anniversary sales, Filandro said.

Then, amid 2007 and 2011, about 400 Appearance Bug food were shuttered. The aggregation aswell absent Bern as CEO in a pitched proxy action with hedge-fund investors.