Ron Herman closed all its U.S. stores in 2023 — a 47-year Melrose legend ends

On Dec. 23, 2023, Ron Herman closed the two-story, 14,000-square-foot store at 8100 Melrose Avenue that had anchored Los Angeles fashion retail since 1976. The Malibu Country Mart outpost had already shut earlier in the year, and the Brentwood store on San Vicente Boulevard closed in October. In under 12 months, the retailer that helped launch J Brand, Trina Turk and Earl Jean went from three Los Angeles stores to none.

The store began in 1976 as a 600-square-foot shop inside the Melrose compound of Fred Segal — Herman's uncle, who had opened his first boutique there in 1961 and made Herman company president in 1971. For decades it was the first place in town to stock emerging Southern California labels, drawing celebrities and fashionistas with a curation model that made it a brand-discovery engine.

In 2019, Tokyo's Sazaby League — which had licensed the Ron Herman name for 14 years — bought the business outright. On the closures, the company said it had "made a strategic decision to reshape its U.S. operations," scaling back its retail footprint "with sights set on renewing its dynamic digital and physical presence in California and abroad." A major sale ran at the Melrose store, and afterward 13 Ron Herman stores and 7 RHC stores remained in Japan, with a single Ron Herman shop in Honolulu that had opened in February 2023.