Eddie Bauer plans to close its corporate headquarters in south Seattle and lay off 60 employees as the struggling outdoor apparel firm's operator looks to find a last-minute buyer for the national chain.
Catalyst Brands, which runs the Seattle-based clothing brand's 175 stores in the United States and Canada, filed a state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification stating that it plans to permanently close the offices with a total of 53,592 square feet on the third and fourth floors of 2200 First Ave. South in the SoDo neighborhood.
The WARN notice, filed on the same day that Texas-based Catalyst Brands started Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection proceedings in New Jersey, said the firm plans to lay off the 60 workers ranging from accountants and production managers to designers and marketing personnel in stages between April 15 and June 1.
The pending closure could add more pressure to greater Seattle's sluggish office market, where the vacancy rate has risen to 17% from less than 10% four years ago. Office leasing volume was down by nearly a third last year from the annual averages for the four years through the end of 2019, just before the pandemic started, according to CoStar data.
Other employees in the Seattle office may have the opportunity to transfer to an affiliated company "in connection with an asset sale involving certain company licenses," according to the WARN notice. The layoffs don't include employees at Eddie Bauer's retail stores.
The chain joins several others, including Saks Global, parent of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, that have filed for bankruptcy and closed stores.
Eddie Bauer has drawn interest from two potential buyers for part of its operations and is looking to potentially use one of them as a stalking-horse bidder, according to court filings. The chain is holding liquidation sales across its stores even as it puts itself up for sale, with a Feb. 27 deadline to submit a stalking-horse bidder to the court.
The retailer moved its corporate offices to 2200 First Ave. South in 2022 after vacating offices at Lincoln Square in downtown Bellevue, an office tower owned by Kemper Development. The chain, founded by outdoorsman Eddie Bauer in 1920, had corporate operations in nearby Redmond before moving to Lincoln Square in 2007.