How a wig company ended up piercing America's ears
Claire's did not begin as a jewelry store, and there was never a founder named Claire. In 1961 Rowland Schaefer started Fashion Tress Industries, a company built to sell wigs at a moment when wigs were a mass market product.
The wig business faded. In 1973 Fashion Tress bought Claire's, a Chicago jewelry chain with 25 stores, and took the smaller company's name for the whole operation.
The decision that actually mattered came in 1978, when Claire's started piercing ears inside its stores. That one service turned a rack of inexpensive earrings into a rite of passage, and it gave the chain something no catalog and later no website could copy. A ten year old came in for a pair of studs and left with a permanent reason to remember the brand.
Claire's now claims more than 131 million piercings performed since 1978, a number the company repeated in its own August 2026 announcement. For a very large share of American women, the first jewelry they ever owned came from a Claire's counter in a shopping mall.
What the $3.1 billion Apollo buyout did to the balance sheet
By the middle of the 2000s the chain was close to saturation. A company filing shows Claire's operating approximately 3,000 stores as of March 3, 2007, across the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and a long list of European countries.
That scale attracted private equity. Apollo Global Management took Claire's private in a merger valued at about $3.1 billion, and the transaction closed on May 29, 2007.
The timing was poor. The buyout loaded debt onto a mall retailer months before the recession, and mall foot traffic in the United States began a decline that never reversed. Claire's spent the following decade servicing that debt rather than rebuilding stores or catching up online.
Its first Chapter 11 filing arrived in 2018. The company cut debt, changed hands and kept trading, but the structural problem stayed put. The same arithmetic emptied Toys R Us and shrank Sears to a rounding error.
Why Claire's filed for Chapter 11 again in August 2025
On August 6, 2025, Claire's Holdings filed for Chapter 11 protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. It was the second bankruptcy since 2018, and this time liquidation was openly on the table.
Chief executive Chris Cramer did not dress it up. "This decision is difficult, but a necessary one," he said in a statement reported by CBS News in 2025.
In the same statement Cramer named the causes: increased competition, consumer spending trends, the ongoing shift away from brick and mortar retail, the company's debt obligations, and macroeconomic factors. That last phrase covered a lot of ground in 2025, including new United States tariffs landing on a business that imports most of what it sells.
Competition had also changed shape. Cheap accessories shipped straight from overseas sellers undercut the mall price and reached the same shoppers through a phone. Specialty mall retail had already proved how fast that can go wrong, as anyone following GameStop and its shrinking store count can attest.
Who Ames Watson is and what the firm actually paid
Claire's found a buyer inside bankruptcy rather than on the courthouse steps. Ames Watson, a private investment firm, agreed to take over the North American business for about $140 million and closed the purchase in September 2025.
The deal covered a store fleet the buyer said it would hold at a minimum of roughly 800 locations, with room to keep as many as 950. Stores outside that count went through closing sales.
Ames Watson framed the purchase as a brand rescue. "Claire's is one of those rare brands that defines a stage of life," partner and co-founder Lawrence Berger said in a 2025 statement reported by Commercial Observer.
His partner made the staffing case. "Every turnaround we've done begins with people," co-founder Tom Ripley said in the same 2025 announcement, pointing to store employees with twenty years or more behind the piercing counter.
That distinction matters for anyone asking whether the brand survived. A liquidator sells the fixtures and licenses the trademark. Ames Watson bought the operating business, the stores and the staff, which is why Claire's still opens its doors every morning.
How many Claire's stores are left in 2026?
About 900 in the United States and Canada. Claire's used that figure itself in August 2026, when it announced a chainwide overhaul of the piercing service covering all 900 locations, with the rollout due to finish in the fall of 2026.
The British and Irish side did not survive. In April 2026 administrators closed every standalone Claire's in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 154 shops in total, cutting around 1,300 jobs. The brand's concession counters inside other retailers were not part of that closure.
North America went the other way. On May 18, 2026, Centric Brands and Claire's announced a licensing partnership intended to put Claire's product into more than 7,000 additional retail locations across the United States and Canada, including Walmart, Kohl's and CVS.
Read together, those two moves describe the strategy. The mall store count stops shrinking at roughly 900, the piercing chair stays as the thing competitors cannot replicate, and the earrings and hair clips go wherever people already shop. Claire's is smaller than it has been since the 1990s, and it is no longer betting its future on the mall.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Claire's closing all of its stores?
No. Claire's filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025 and closed hundreds of locations, but the North American business was sold to Ames Watson in September 2025 and about 900 Claire's stores were still trading in the United States and Canada in 2026. The exception is the United Kingdom and Ireland, where all 154 standalone Claire's shops closed in April 2026.
Who owns Claire's now?
Claire's North American business has been owned by the private investment firm Ames Watson since September 2025, when it completed a roughly $140 million purchase out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Before that, Claire's had been controlled by lenders following its 2018 bankruptcy, and by Apollo Global Management after a $3.1 billion buyout that closed in May 2007.
Does Claire's still pierce ears in 2026?
Yes. Ear piercing remains the core of the business, and in August 2026 Claire's announced a rebuilt piercing service rolling out across all 900 of its United States and Canadian stores, with new training, updated clinical standards and a new earring range. Claire's says it has performed more than 131 million piercings since it began offering the service in 1978.