One of New Zealand’s longest running family clothing chains is winding up. Ballentynes Fashion Central confirmed on Friday that it is closing after more than 50 years in business, with a closing down sale already under way across its network.
The company has 23 stores. Ten of them will keep trading and become part of the Caroline Eve chain. The other 13 will shut over the coming months, starting from 15 August, RNZ reported.
The stores that survive are in Blenheim, Richmond, Whanganui, Feilding, Palmerston North, Paraparaumu, Hawera, Levin, Lower Hutt and Masterton. Gift vouchers will be honoured at those stores for six months after the handover.
Set that list against the company’s own store directory and the shape of the decision becomes clear. The 13 stores going are the five Auckland shops at Albany, Botany Downs, Henderson, Manukau and New Lynn, four Wellington shops at Johnsonville, Kilbirnie, Porirua and Upper Hutt, and four provincial stores at Dannevirke, New Plymouth, Otaki and Taupo.
Almost the entire big city footprint is being abandoned. Every Auckland store goes. Four of the six Wellington region stores go, and the two that stay, Lower Hutt and Paraparaumu, sit on the edge of the region rather than in the middle of it. What is left is a chain of provincial main street and small mall shops running down the lower North Island and across the top of the South Island. Those are the stores a rival wanted to buy, and the metropolitan ones are the stores nobody wanted.
The family put out a short message rather than a corporate statement. “On behalf of the Ballentyne family – including our incredible team of staff in the stores and in our warehouse, we would like to thank you for your support and shopping with us over the years,” the company said on its website.
The business was started in 1972 by Graham and Eunice Ballentyne and a second generation of the family has been running it since, according to the company’s own published profile. In the South Island the shops trade under the Fashion Central name, which is why the Blenheim and Richmond stores carry a different sign to the ones in Levin or Feilding.
No receiver or liquidator has been appointed and none has been announced. On the face of it this is an orderly wind down by the owners, with the better performing half of the chain sold to a competitor and the rest closed through a clearance sale. That is a very different outcome to a collapse, and it usually means suppliers and staff are treated better than they would be in a formal insolvency. It is still the end of a company that has been part of provincial retail for longer than most of its customers have been shopping.
Caroline Eve, which describes itself as New Zealand owned and operated and sells womenswear in sizes 8 to 22, ends up with 10 more shops in towns where it already competes for the same customer. For a chain that sells to women over 40 in provincial New Zealand, buying an established site with an established customer list is a cheaper way to grow than opening a new store and waiting for people to find it.
The timing is not a surprise to anyone watching the numbers. Clothing has been the weakest part of New Zealand retail for two years. Retail card spending fell 1.4 percent in June, and within that total apparel fell 2.2 percent, one of the worst performing categories in the Stats NZ electronic card transactions series. Groceries were about the only category still growing.
That is not a one month wobble. Card spending on clothing and footwear has been sliding in nominal terms since early 2024, which means the fall in the number of garments actually being sold is steeper again once price rises are stripped out. A clothing shop can survive a flat year. It cannot easily survive two years of falling volumes while rent, wages, freight and insurance all keep climbing.
Ballentynes is not the only chain to give up on the New Zealand market this year. Australian homewares retailer Adairs confirmed in May that it was closing all of its New Zealand stores, blaming rising costs and changing shopping habits. Discretionary retail, the stuff people buy because they want it rather than because they need it, has taken the hardest hit of any part of the consumer economy.
Behind that sits a household budget problem. Unemployment reached 5.6 percent in the June quarter, with about 440,000 New Zealanders wanting more work than they have. People who are worried about their job do not replace a coat that still fits. Apparel is one of the first things cut and one of the last things restored.
The company has not said how many staff are affected. With 13 stores closing, most of them in Auckland and Wellington, and a warehouse operation behind them, the number will run well into the dozens. Those job losses land in a market where retail vacancies are already thin.
For the towns keeping a store the change is mostly cosmetic. The sign changes, the buying decisions move to a new head office, and the shop stays open. For Albany, Botany Downs, Henderson, Manukau, New Lynn, Johnsonville, Kilbirnie, Porirua, Upper Hutt, Dannevirke, New Plymouth, Otaki and Taupo, another shopfront goes dark.
Have you shopped at Ballentynes or Fashion Central, or worked in one of the stores? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply