Key Takeaways:
- West Marine filed a fourth round of store closures on Thursday, adding eight locations and pushing the confirmed total past 100.
- No qualified bids were received by the June 26 deadline, canceling the planned auction and ending the sale track.
- The company’s confirmation hearing, where a judge will formally approve its reorganization plan, is set for August 11.
West Marine, a large outdoor, water, and surf retail account which filed for bankruptcy protection on May 17, keeps adding to its store closure list. The marine retailer filed its fourth round of store closing notices on July 30, adding eight locations across seven states and pushing the total number of confirmed closures to 101 — more than half of the roughly 200-store footprint CEO Paulee Day cited at the time of filing.
The latest stores set to close are in New Castle, Delaware; North Charleston, South Carolina; Traverse City, Michigan; Alameda, California; Gloucester Point, Virginia; Apollo Beach, Florida; Seekonk, Massachusetts; and Washington, North Carolina.
No Buyers, No Auction
The store closures are unfolding alongside a sale process that came up empty. A court filing dated June 26 states that the company received zero qualified bids for any asset or portion of assets by the June 26 bid deadline. With nothing to auction, the company formally canceled the June 29 auction and confirmed it will proceed with its original reorganization plan instead.
Under that plan, according to court documents, the lenders who hold roughly $251.2 million in term loan debt will convert what they are owed into 100% ownership of the reorganized company once it exits bankruptcy. That path was always the fallback option built into West Marine’s restructuring from the start. The company entered Chapter 11 with two tracks open simultaneously — a sale to an outside buyer or a lender-led recapitalization — and the sale track has now closed without a deal.
What Comes Next
The court hearing where Judge Karen B. Owens will formally approve West Marine’s reorganization plan is scheduled for August 11 at 10 a.m. Eastern in Wilmington, Delaware. That hearing is the last major milestone before the company can exit bankruptcy.
West Marine has now filed four rounds of store closing notices since entering bankruptcy in May, with the company saying in each filing that more closures could still be coming.
Florida has taken the heaviest hit across all four lists, with 18 locations closing. Washington, California and Michigan each have multiple closures across the combined lists.
As SESO has previously reported, West Marine entered bankruptcy on May 17 carrying $549.2 million in debt and roughly $50 million in annual rent obligations. CEO Paulee Day cited the lease portfolio as one of the most intractable problems the company faced outside of a court-supervised process.
