Crabtree & Evelyn grew from a single shop to 200 stores worldwide — then closed them all

Crabtree 2 Evelyn began in 1955 as a single soap shop called The Soap Box in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1971 it rebranded as Crabtree 2 Evelyn, borrowing the name of the 17th-century English diarist John Evelyn and the wild crab-apple tree. First stand-alone store opened in 1977, followed by London in 1980. The brand's English-countryside aesthetic and fruit-and-flower soaps, lotions and fragrances found a global audience across Asia, Europe and the Americas. At its peak, Crabtree 2 Evelyn had approximately 200 stores in 30 countries.

The company changed hands three times. In 1996, founder Cyrus Harvey sold it to Kuala Lumpur Kepong Berhad (KLK), a Malaysian plantation conglomerate. In 2012, KLK sold it to Khuan Choo International, a Hong Kong holding company, for US$155 million. In October 2016, Nan Hai Corporation, another Hong Kong company, acquired it. Each new owner brought a different strategy, but the underlying business was deteriorating: e-commerce, declining mall footfall, and direct-to-consumer beauty brands eroded the retail model Crabtree & Evelyn had relied on for decades.

In July 2009, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States and closed 30 of its 126 American stores. It survived the bankruptcy but did not fix its retail model. On November 14, 2018, Crabtree & Evelyn announced it would close all retail and wholesale operations worldwide by early 2019. Stores across the US, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and other markets were shuttered. The brand attempted an online-only relaunch on July 16, 2019 from a London warehouse, but the US website stopped sales in February 2022 and has remained dormant since.

The case is notable because Crabtree 2 Evelyn was not a startup that burned through venture capital, nor a retailer killed by a single bad decision. It was a profitable, long-established brand that spent three decades building a physical retail empire, then discovered that empire had no place in the world that was coming.