The Mall Staple That Filed Twice
Published October 4, 2026
In August 2025, Claire's — the mall chain famous for affordable jewelry and first ear piercings — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time in seven years, reporting estimated assets and liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion. Private investment firm Ames Watson bought the North American business in September for about $140 million, keeping up to 950 stores open while 291 locations were slated for closure.
For generations of tweens, Claire's was a rite of passage: the mall kiosk where you got your first ear piercing, your first lip gloss, your first plastic choker. In August 2025, the 64-year-old chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — for the second time in seven years. Court filings put estimated assets and liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion. At the time of the filing, the retailer operated more than 2,750 stores across 17 countries, with roughly 1,350 locations in the United States, including its Icing sister stores and shop-in-shops inside Walmart.
The company had been here before. Claire's first filed for Chapter 11 in 2018 and emerged later that year under new ownership by Elliott Management and Monarch Alternative Capital, which shed a heavy debt load in the restructuring. But the balance-sheet surgery did not fix the underlying patient. Online shopping kept pulling teenagers away from malls, fast-fashion rivals like Shein and Temu undercut Claire's prices, and consumer spending slowed. In 2025, uncertainty over tariffs on Chinese imports — where much of the merchandise was made — compounded the pressure, affecting the company's ability to refinance a $475 million loan due the following year.
The second filing revealed how thin the margin for error had become. Suppliers became unwilling creditors: several Asian vendors alleged they were owed millions of dollars for holiday merchandise ordered before the bankruptcy, when Elliott Management still owned the company, according to claims filed in Hong Kong and reported by CNBC. By the time production was finished, Claire's had already filed. Some suppliers kept shipping anyway, out of fear that refusing would destroy the business relationship with one of their largest customers — and then watched the new owners argue, under Hong Kong law, that the old liabilities did not transfer with the sale.
A rescue arrived in September 2025. Private investment firm Ames Watson agreed to acquire the North American business and intellectual property in a deal worth nearly $140 million, keeping up to 950 stores open and assuming a significant share of vendor, landlord, and cure costs, along with $36 million in seller financing. The deal paused some liquidations and was pitched as a turning point — a smaller but stronger Claire's, rebuilt around its piercing business and brand loyalty. Even so, 291 stores were slated for closure, and the long-term question the first bankruptcy never answered remained open: can a mall-dependent retailer thrive when its customers live online?
The suppliers' plight is the quietest part of the story and the most instructive. Restructuring law exists to give a struggling company a second chance, but the cost of that second chance falls on the businesses that shipped real goods on credit — merchandise made, boxed, and delivered to a company that could no longer pay. For the factory owners filing claims in Hong Kong, Claire's was not a nostalgic brand; it was an unpaid invoice.
Claire's survived its second bankruptcy, at least in a downsized form. But its history now reads as a warning about what debt restructuring can and cannot do. The 2018 deal erased billions in obligations yet changed little about how the company made money, and the market it depended on kept shrinking. A balance-sheet rescue only works if the business itself can still pay its way — otherwise, the second filing is just the first one, repeated.
The lesson: Debt restructuring can't fix a business model the market has moved past — a second chance needs new economics, not just new owners.
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