Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams furniture company abruptly shuts down
The furniture manufacturing and retail company Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, named after the two gay businessmen who founded the firm in 1989 before selling it in 2015, announced last week that it is shutting down all its operations due to a sudden loss of financing.
During the years of Gold and Williams’s ownership, the company expanded its operations from a single furniture store in D.C.
to the operation of 24 high-end furniture stores across the country and three furniture factories in North Carolina. Gold couldn’t immediately be reached by the Washington Blade for comment.
The Washington Post reported that many of the company’s estimated 800 employees received word of the shutdown and their impending layoff over the past weekend through a letter posted at the company’s factories and stores by the Stephens Group, a Little Rock, Ark., equity firm that bought the company from Gold and Williams in 2015. “Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams has recently and unexpectedly learned that we are unable to continue business operations,” the Post quotes the letter as saying. “As you may know, the current economic climate has presented significant challenges to the furniture industry… [The company] has recently and unexpectedly learned that we are unable to secure critical financing to continue business operations,” the letter states.
