| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Crafts and Fabrics |
| Founded | Cleveland, Ohio (1943) |
| Headquarters | Hudson, Ohio, U.S. |
| Number of locations | 750+[1] |
| Key people | Darrell Webb, Chairman of the Board, President and CEO [2] |
| Owner(s) | Leonard Green & Partners |
| Website | www.joann.com |
Jo-Ann Stores, Inc. is a specialty retailer of crafts and fabrics based in Hudson, Ohio. It operates the retail chains Jo-Ann Fabrics and Jo-Ann Etc. The headquarters of the company is located in the former General Motors Terex plant.
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Jo-Ann Fabrics was founded in 1943 when, german immigrants, Hilda and Berthold Reich, and their friends Sigmund and Mathilda Rohrbach, opened an imported cheese store in Cleveland. Fabric was added, which sold very well. So they opened a second store. Without having money for second store inventory, full bolts were divided into two, for the second store inventory. Eventually, they removed the cheese and added fabrics and opened the first Cleveland Fabric Shop. Expansion in the 1960s led to the company's new name, Jo-Ann Fabrics.
In 1999, Jo-Ann Fabrics became a publicly-held corporation traded on the American Stock Exchange under the name of Fabri-Centers of America, Inc. During the 1970s, Jo-Ann Fabrics opened stores in shopping malls; by the 1980s, they left most malls and added crafts and floral. In 1994, the company made its first acquisition of Cloth World, a 342-store southern company; at the time of the acquisition, Fabri-Centers operated 655 stores.
In 1998, they acquired House of Fabrics, which also operated as Fabricland and Fabric King. At that time, Fabri-Centers renamed the company Jo-Ann Stores Inc. and converted all House of Fabrics, Fabricland, Fabric King, and Cloth World stores to simply Jo-Ann Fabrics. Today, Jo-Ann Fabrics is a leading national specialty retailer of crafting, decorating and sewing products.
On December 23, 2010, Jo-Ann Stores announced plans to sell out to Leonard Green for $1.6 billion, becoming the latest U.S. chain to be targeted by a private-equity buy-out.[3]
Jo-Ann stores offer classes in many areas of crafting. These include knitting, crochet, quilting, sewing, scrapbooking, painting, jewelry-making, floral design, and foodcrafting.[4]
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