Everything is on sale at a Joann’s store just north of New York City.
In the sewing section, some shopping carts have all but disappeared under bolts of cotton, tulle, and fleece. But the mood is hardly festive. The busy atmosphere and steep discounts are signs of a sad ending for a beloved institution. Or, as one dark-haired young shopper puts it: “It’s a bummer.”
Last month, Joann Fabric and Crafts, a fixture of American shopping for generations, announced it would close all of its more than 800 stores in the U.S. and lay off 19,000 workers, including more than 15,000 part-time store associates. The company is in the midst of its second bankruptcy in less than a year.
Joann’s isn’t the only retail chain that has failed lately—Party City and clothing shop Forever 21 have both filed for bankruptcy. But the demise of Joann’s hit a nerve, and an army of devoted staffers and customers have shared their grief in a wave of online tributes.
In heartfelt videos posted on Instagram and Facebook, head office employees choke up recalling the lunch hours spent crocheting with their teams. Customers wax nostalgic about past mother-daughter projects and long Saturday afternoons at Joann, and several fans share intense “last haul” videos, scoring images of empty shelves with melancholy pop songs.
“Joann is f—ing closing,” said one young tear-stained shopper in a TikTok post.
“No shade to Michael’s or Hobby Lobby or anything like that,” she says, referring to the store’s closest competitors. “But Joann feels like home.”
The emotional farewells, however, have been accompanied by murder-mystery-style sleuthing about how the brand reached this point. In the late 1990s, Joann was the largest craft brand in the U.S., and became a Fortune 1000 company for two years during the pandemic, only to lose 99% of its value between 2021 and 2024. “I’m baffled as to how they managed to fail,” says Diana McDonough, a longtime customer and member of the Ohio Valley Quilting Guild.
In a statement published when the company filed for bankruptcy this year, Joann attributed the move to “significant and lasting challenges in the retail environment” and its “financial position and constrained inventory levels.”
Former employees and vendors who spoke to Fortune have theories about what happened. For many, the answer to the question “Who killed Joann?” is simple: Leonard Green. In 2011, the L.A.-based private equity company took Joann private for $1.6 billion in a leveraged buyout that saddled the company with significant debt.
But some say that debt alone doesn’t tell the whole story. They point to long-running cultural headwinds, staffing choices that created a dearth of workers in a customer-service-heavy industry, failure to respond to surprisingly tough competition, a revolving door of CEOs, and overconfidence sparked by a pandemic boom.
Joann Fabrics and Leonard Green & Partners declined to comment for this story.
“They really did this to themselves,” says Alan Porter, a former district manager who worked at Joann for 16 years. “Because the business is there.”
A cultural relic
Joann’s founders—two German immigrant families in Cleveland—likely never imagined their business would become as big as it did.
They launched the specialty store in 1945 as Cleveland Fabric Shop and later renamed it Joann, combining the first names of daughters from both families: Joan and Jacqueline Ann. (For many years, the company went by Jo-Ann Stores.) By 1963, Joann had 18 locations. In 1969, the fabric chain went public.
Virtually everything about our relationship with clothes has changed since Joann’s early days. At one time, sewing machines were a mainstay of American households, and most women learned to sew—but that all changed with the women’s movement, globalization, and the rise of fast fashion. Leaving aside “tradwives” and Etsy shop owners, most people now sew for leisure, not out of necessity. “How many young women are leaving college and their college graduation gift is a sewing machine?” says Lori Kendall, a senior lecturer of management at Ohio State University’s business school.
A larger pivot within the U.S. retail climate to e-commerce and big-box stores has also made it harder for a relatively small company like Joann to compete with behemoths like Amazon and Walmart. Along with the decline in the popularity of sewing, that shift created a “double whammy” for Joann, says Kendall.
New pressures and an unsolicited bid
Joann entered the 21st century as a family-run business, but not always a thriving one.
In 2006, the company hired Darrell Webb, who had been president of grocer Fred Meyer, to take over as the brand’s first non-family CEO. At that time, the company was struggling with uneven sales and too much inventory. “We had stores that weren’t clean, and he came in and brought this tremendous discipline, not only to the corporate culture but to the stores’ culture,” says an executive who worked at Joann at the same time as Webb but asked to remain anonymous to protect his privacy. Webb, he says, brought sparkling restrooms and tight inventory control: “That was a very positive shot in the arm.”
Alan Porter, who worked at Joann for 16 years, beginning as a store manager around 2004 and leaving as a Florida district manager in 2020, agrees. He credits Webb with setting Joann on what could have been a sustainable path. Webb and his leadership team did that largely by “getting back to basics,” Porter tells Fortune, and right-sizing the stores’ overgrown retail footprint. The CEO talked to store staff across the country, too, Porter says, learning how to make Joann a mecca for its core audience: sewers.
Fortune could not reach Webb for comment.
But Webb stepped down from his role in 2011 and took a seat on the board after Joann accepted an unsolicited bid from Leonard Green & Partners to take the company private. That $1.6 billion leveraged deal left the company with a mountain of debt—the remnants of which would bog it down for years—and meant Joann would pay steep annual management fees.
In the best-case scenario, private equity firms provide an injection of cash that allows a company to grow and create jobs before the firm finds an exit—like a sale or an IPO—and cashes out with a decent return. But timing, market conditions, and interest rates don’t always cooperate. Making matters worse, buyouts are made with funds borrowed against the company’s assets, meaning a company like Joann—which had no debt in 2010 and hit a record-high stock price that year—can find itself severely overleveraged and forced to raise prices or cut costs, including labor, to survive. If the market turns, or a company is poorly managed, and refinancing becomes harder, paying down debt can prove impossible.
“It may make the individuals rich at the time,” Chad Zipfel, a finance lecturer at Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business, says of leveraged buyouts. “But it often portends future hurt.”
The Joann experience changes
Leonard Green initially looked like the right answer, according to the former executive who remembers discussions from that time. As private equity firms went, this person says, the PE firm was known for being hands-off, which was appealing.
Joann initially maintained the close-knit culture instilled by the family-run firm even after its PE acquisition, the former executive recalls. However, that eroded with time. One major culture shock came when then-CEO Jill Soltau, who had not previously worked in craft retail, hired consultants from McKinsey to analyze the workforce, which led to layoffs, he recalls. (Soltau did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.) Between 2011 and 2023, nine executives rotated through the CEO office, including Webb and two sets of interim co-chiefs.
Porter also says that the company began reducing headcount inside stores in the 2010s to save on payroll costs, which led to a cascade of issues.
Unlike cans of soup that get restocked by the caseload, fabric often must be measured by employees at a cutting counter. One customer might need half a yard from six different heavy bolts, and the next person could have an even more complicated sewing project, Porter explains. When his stores didn’t have enough staff on hand, fabric bolts piled up at the cutting counter, and customers faced 45-minute-long wait times.
Elizabeth Caven, an Ohio-based crafts business investor who is also a vendor at Joann, adds that the sewing-obsessed staff were “one of the reasons why originally you would want to go into the store.”
“Usually, while the cutting process is happening, there’s a conversation: ‘What are you making?’ ‘What else do you need to go with this?’” Joann’s associates could make invaluable suggestions, she explains. But finding those helpful employees became “hit or miss,” she says.
Caven noticed staffing issues of another kind as well. In the process of pitching a handheld pattern projector to the company, she was stunned to discover that a head buyer had never seen paper patterns outside of their packaging. “The higher up in the company that you would go, the less there was an understanding of what the customer actually wanted to do,” she says.
Meanwhile, in the late 2010s, Hobby Lobby began expanding across the country, offering craft supplies and a limited selection of fabric. The chain had started in Oklahoma City in the 1970s and was a regional competitor for decades.
Hobby Lobby’s rise as a national rival was the tipping point for Joann’s decline, according to the former executive. The retailer was family-owned, he notes, so it wasn’t facing the same financial pressures as Joann. It didn’t have hundreds of millions in debt to worry about, or management fees. Meanwhile, it had less emphasis on labor-intensive sewing requests, and its goods were often cheaper. The famously Christian and mission-driven store quickly stole market share from Joann, which responded with more cost-cutting, further impacting the customer experience, which created a self-perpetuating cycle.
Pandemic boom and bust
After a rough few years, Joann’s fortunes changed again.
Entering 2020, the chain was still in debt to the tune of $900 million, which Moody’s flagged as distressed. But in the first nine months of that year, revenue reached $1.9 billion, representing nearly 25% year-over-year growth, according to its subsequent IPO filing. COVID-19 lockdowns that kept people indoors had sparked a crafting renaissance.
It wasn’t just amateurs who had found Joann’s, then-CEO Wade Miquelon told Fortune in 2021. The brand also attracted side-hustle sellers and small businesses. “Fundamentally there has been a shift for people who want to do more do-it-yourself projects,” he said.
With sales soaring, Leonard Green saw an opportunity to exit. The private equity firm put the company back on the market that year in a public offering that raised $131 million, with Leonard Green remaining the majority shareholder.
But just a year later, it was clear that what looked like a new era for the crafting store was in fact more of a “blip,” the executive who asked to remain anonymous said. Joann’s pandemic boom went bust, and the store once again belonged solely to its most dedicated hobbyists. With sales in the now-public company plummeting year over year, Joann’s share price dropped below a dollar in 2024, triggering a Nasdaq delisting and its first bankruptcy last April.
Miquelon, who resigned in 2023, did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
To outsiders, says OSU professor Zipfel, it appears that Joann’s CEO fell victim to a common psychological trap. “When times are good, we think they’ll always be good,” he says. “It’s hard as a finance leader to say: ‘Hey everyone, let’s pull back a little bit. Let’s not go so heavy into hiring and assuming these spending trends will continue.’”
The store also failed to take measures such as adding subscriptions or creative services, for example, that may have helped it to retain its pandemic-rush customers.
Last year, Joann struggled to keep its shelves stocked, which is not uncommon after a bankruptcy. Suppliers often worry about sending more products to a shaky business, unsure whether they will get paid. In November of 2024, news broke that Joann was looking for rebates from vendors.
Two months later, the store declared a second Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and was eventually bought by a liquidator.
“It’s quite sad,” says Caven. “They were clearly the category leader.”
When President Donald Trump announced that he had tapped 29-year-old Bo Hines for a prized role advising his ambitious crypto agenda, the blockchain industry was thrown off guard. Hines, a two-time Republican congressional candidate, had never held a formal business role in the tight-knit crypto sector.
But he did have strong ties to the Trump orbit, and a seven-figure show of support for the Trump campaign, according to public records, financial filings, and an interview with Hines.
Just one week before the 2024 presidential election, the growth investment firm Hines cofounded, Nxum Group, donated $1 million in pro-Trump campaign billboard advertisements to the $400 million Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., according to Federal Election Commission filings. Hines, who confirmed he oversaw all of Nxum’s work in the political space, declined to provide more details about the donations and advertisements, saying only that his company helped on the “marketing side.”
Trump appointed Hines to lead his presidential council on digital assets in December, with Hines taking on a top role advancing blockchain policy below David Sacks, the venture capital heavyweight that Trump tapped as his crypto and AI czar. Though Sacks has the senior position, a spokesperson for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where the roles are housed, said that Hines and Sacks “work side by side and very closely.”
Hines has been instrumental in helping Trump carry out his sweeping effort to reform the government’s approach to the blockchain industry, moving away from the confrontational relationship that developed during the Biden administration. In his role, Hines serves as a liaison between the White House, the crypto industry, and lawmakers and regulatory agencies. At the White House crypto summit in March, Hines sat at the main table along with Trump, Sacks, and other administration bigwigs.
From congressional candidate to crypto liaison
Hines’ path to becoming the U.S. government’s crypto emissary is an interesting one. Four years after he graduated from Yale, Hines ran for the House in a North Carolina district in the Raleigh area with an endorsement from Trump, making it to the general election before he lost in 2022. Two years later, in 2024, he lost in the primary in a different district. Hines says he translated his experience running for office into his work at Charlotte-based Nxum. The firm, which Hines cofounded with his father and another partner, does data, tech, and marketing, including political consulting, for companies it backs. Hines says he oversaw all of its political work.
“I jumped into the political arena at a young age,” he said. “I think that we were just a little bit frustrated with some of the archaic ways in which people advertise in that space.”
One of the companies in the firm’s portfolio is Today is America, a self-described “anti-woke” media organization targeted at Gen Z, where Hines says he served as head of operations to “get that off the ground,” then in 2023, after Nxum took an ownership stake in the company, Hines became the organization’s CEO. Today is America ran the social media accounts and partnered on get-out-the-vote efforts for a conservative student advocacy group called Students for Trump.
In October, Students for Trump announced a partnership with a memecoin project called Restore the Republic. The proceeds of any sales were pledged to the Trump campaign (Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, had disavowed any Trump-family connection to the token in August, causing its price to plummet 95%, before Hines became involved.) “With this partnership, we aim to make a meaningful impact on voter turnout, especially among young Americans,” Hines said in a press release announcing a partnership where the student group would hold events and forums to rally support for Trump in swing states. A week prior to that announcement, Hines appeared with Donald Trump’s other son, Donald Trump Jr., on a livestream hosted by Restore the Republic.
Hines told Fortune that he was not involved with the management or promotion of the memecoin. Today is America’s only work with Restore the Republic was to gin up attention for Trump on social media and get out the vote efforts ahead of the election, he says, saying he has never owned any of the token himself and therefore did not personally gain by promoting it.
Since taking his White House role, Hines is a non-acting partner at Nxum, and he says that the firm’s political work is now handled by the firm’s other two general partners, one of whom is his father.
Today’s most effective leaders aren’t just strategists or visionaries; they’re simplifiers. These executives can cut through bureaucracy, strip away bloat, and prioritize speed and agility over sprawling hierarchies and tangled workflows.
As companies scale, they inevitably accumulate more processes, meetings, metrics, policies, and platforms, writes Fortune’s Lily Mae Lazarus. Each addition may be well-intentioned, but over time, the layers calcify, slowing decision-making and suffocating innovation. The cost isn’t just cultural; it’s financial. Bain & Company estimates that excessive complexity erodes more than 15% of large companies’ profits each year.
Enter the simplifier-in-chief. These leaders are clear-eyed about the hidden toll of complexity and are unafraid to challenge entrenched ways of working. They focus on prioritizing what matters, eliminating friction, and empowering their teams to move faster and smarter. They also know that in today’s market, velocity is a competitive advantage—and that too much process often creates the illusion of control while actually stalling progress.
Several CEOs appear to agree.
—Amazon’s Andy Jassy has stressed the need to eliminate internal drag that slows innovation. —GM’s Mary Barra has long championed cutting red tape to accelerate product cycles. —Bayer’s Bill Anderson is slashing 99% of corporate rules and flattening management through his “dynamic shared ownership” model. —JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon put it bluntly: “Bureaucracy and BS kill companies.”
The shift toward simplification isn’t just about efficiency, though. It’s about resilience, writes Lazarus. When the environment shifts—as it inevitably does—simplified organizations can adapt faster and cultivate cultures that are more responsive, creative, and aligned around shared goals.
The Trump administration is doubling down on its decision not to tell a federal court whether it has any plans to repatriate a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported last month and remains confined in a notorious prison in El Salvador, despite a Supreme Court ruling and lower court order that the man should be returned to the United States. The U.S. district court judge handling the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia now is weighing whether to grant a request from the man’s legal team to compel the government to explain why it should not be held in contempt. Any move toward a contempt finding would represent an extraordinary turn in the Trump administration’s assertion of presidential authority, both generally and specifically over immigration policy.
The government’s latest daily status update, filed Sunday as required by Judge Paula Xinis, states essentially that the Trump administration has nothing to add beyond its Saturday statement that, for the first time, confirmed that Abrego Garcia, 29, was alive and remained in an El Salvador prison under the control of that country’s government. That means for the second consecutive day, the administration has not addressed Xinis’ demands that the administration detail what steps it was taking to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that the Trump administration must bring him back. Xinis followed that with an order Friday requiring the administration to disclose Abrego Garcia’s “current physical location and custodial status” and “what steps, if any, Defendants have taken (and) will take, and when, to facilitate” his return.
The Trump administration has asserted that Abrego Garcia, who lived in the U.S. for about 14 years before being deported, is a member of the MS-13 gang. Abrego Garcia has disputed that claim, and he has never been charged with any crime related to such activity. The Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake but also has argued, essentially, that its conclusion about Abrego Garcia’s affiliation makes him ineligible for protection from the courts.
Abrego Garcia’s location was first confirmed to the court by Michael G. Kozak, who identified himself in the Saturday filing as a “Senior Bureau Official” in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. Sunday’s status update was signed by Evan C. Katz, who was identified in the filing as assistant director of Enforcement and Removal Operations for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security.
Separately, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have asked Xinis to issue an order compelling the government to explain to the court why it should not be held in contempt for failing to comply fully with previous orders. As of early Sunday evening, Xinis had not filed such an order.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers also have asked Xinis to order the government, among other things, to produce documents and contracts that detail the U.S. agreement with El Salvador to house people deported from the U.S. or, in absence of such records, to require that government officials testify in court about the arrangement.
Xinis expressed frustration Friday during a hearing in her Maryland courtroom when a U.S. government attorney struggled to provide any information about Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts.
“Where is he and under whose authority?” the judge asked during the hearing. “I’m not asking for state secrets. All I know is that he’s not here. The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: Where is he?”
The judge repeatedly asked a government attorney about what has been done to return Abrego Garcia, asking pointedly: “Have they done anything?”
Drew Ensign, a deputy assistant attorney general, told Xinis that he had no personal knowledge about any actions or plans to return Abrego Garcia. But he told the judge the government was “actively considering what could be done” and said that Abrego Garcia’s case involved three Cabinet agencies and significant coordination.
Kozak’s statement a day later stated: “It is my understanding based on official reporting from our Embassy in San Salvador that Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”
The Justice Department has not responded to an Associated Press request for comment.
During his time in the U.S., Abrego Garcia worked construction, got married and was raising three children with disabilities, according to court records.
A U.S. immigration judge initially shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to El Salvador because he likely faced persecution there by local gangs that terrorized his family. The Trump administration deported him there last month anyway, before describing the mistake as “an administrative error” but standing by its claims that he was in MS-13.
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