Lopez-Castro said he may be in luck as it was likely the trustee would allow customers to pay the balance instead of selling the dress in a liquidation sale. The two are fearful that if they don’t get the dress back they won’t have enough money for another one. “There’s no point in going if the store is closed,” Esquivel said. The two were not going to the store to see what is going on. She texted him Friday, scared, after hearing the store had closed, Esquivel said. The Alfred Angelo customer could file a claim, but it “will not be worth very much.”Īnaheim resident Victor Esquivel’s fiancee Airam Arroyo put a deposit on an Alfred Angelo dress at Brea Mall. If a creditor has a lien on the inventory, they may choose to resell the dress, Lopez-Castro said. He said the judge and trustee would work together to make these decisions. “I hope nobody has a wedding this weekend,” Friedman added. “The trustee is going to need some time to figure things out,” she said. The owners of the company and the suppliers and the landlords will take the major hits.”įor any rapidly approaching weddings, Lopez-Castro suggests going to Plan B. “It would be unusual to punish the consumer or the public.
“I would be surprised if a judge didn’t give them their inventory,” he said. Ron Friedman, a CPA and retail expert at Marcum’s Century City office and co-leader in the firm’s National Retail & Consumer Products Industry group, thinks the brides will get their dresses. Not doing so, she said, would be a “public relations nightmare and frankly chaos.” “It would seem to me that the better course of business would be to release the dress to the customer,” Lopez-Castro said. “I’m almost to the point where I’m saying ‘forget the wedding.’”įor rapidly approaching weddings, brides and customers of Angelo’s may be out of luck.Ĭorali Lopez-Castro, a partner at Kozyak Tropin & Throckmorton, has handled retail bankruptcies in the past.Īll decisions about dresses, she said, are up to a trustee, not the company, in a Chapter 7 filing, which indicates an asset liquidation rather than a Chapter 11 restructuring. “I worked so much overtime just to pay for that. Taylor said she thinks it’s unlikely she’ll get her deposit back. Taylor had paid for most of it and was going to complete the purchase when the dress was ready this fall, she said.Īfter learning the company had shut down, she tried calling different stores and rushed to one in Ontario because the phone number still worked, only to see a rack of dresses inside the locked doors, she said. So they came and shopped with us.”įor Redlands bride-to-be Brenda Taylor, 37, the frustration and disappointment have led her to consider canceling her July wedding next summer.Īfter looking for a dress for a year, she finally found one at Alfred Angelo’s Riverside store that she liked and that came in her size - the Jasmine gown from the Disney collection. “We had a couple walk in the door who had gone to an Alfred Angelo store in Brea by the Brea Mall, and they said that store was no longer able to order dresses - everything in the store was discounted.
“We kind of got wind about it last weekend,” she said. Tory Dean, a manager with The Dresser Bridal Couture shop in Fullerton, said she figured something was up before the stores abruptly closed. “We have no comment at this time,” she said. Redmond could not be reached Friday and her assistant couldn’t provide any information either. Redmond with the Miami, Fla.-based law firm Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson. As for the veils, she may buy another set but has a few days to figure that out.īrides or bridal parties who have been affected by the sudden closures have been advised to contact attorney Patricia A. The dress was safe, the shopkeeper told her.
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