City Sports, the defunct urban-based sports apparel seller that liquidated its remaining 26 stores late last year, may get a second wind thanks to two brothers who own the Soccer Post chain of retail stores.
The Jersey brothers purchased the City Sports logo and Web site out of bankruptcy for $400,000.
An email blast to City Sports’ old customers last Friday revealed the comeback bid under a new company, to be called City Sports USA based in Eatontown, NJ.
“We’re just two guys from New Jersey,” said Brent Sonnek-Schmelz, the chief financial officer of Soccer Post. “We loved the City Sports brand and how they connected with their customers.”
He is teaming with his brother and company president Blake to give the shuttered sportswear chain another go.
Their plan is to gear up later this year, first with an online store and then ultimately urban stores in the northeast.
Sonnek-Schmelz said they will shun the suburbs — where many of the 33 Soccer Post stores are based — and concentrate on city retail outlets.
“We’re trying to make it what it was before, concentrating on that urban athlete who wants to train hard,” he said.
That is similar to the way the chain started in 1983: two tennis-playing high school buddies, Mike Kennedy and Eric Martin, opened a store in Boston that specialized in racquet sports, running, swimming and footwear.
In 2008, they sold it to investment firm Highland Capital, which planned an aggressive push beyond its urban base into affluent suburbs with a target of 300 outlets within five years.
But the recession and back-to-back brutal winters in 2014 and 2015, along with the higher cost of doing business in the suburbs, upended those plans.
When City Sports filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last October, it had two New York City stores in Rockefeller Center and Soho, one in the affluent Long Island town of Manhasset and 23 in six other Northeastern states.
While the initial restructuring plan was to shut some stores and stay in business, a dispute between unsecured creditors and Wells Fargo ultimately forced a sale to the Gordon Brothers and Hilco Merchant Resources, who decided the best way forward was the pre-Christmas liquidation sale.
