Wilsons Leather closing Las Vegas warehouse

Friday, Jan. 23, 2004 | 11:26 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

Wilsons The Leather Experts Inc., a retailer of leather clothing and accessories, plans to close as many as 100 stores and eliminate about 1,000 jobs to reduce expenses as it renegotiates agreements with lenders.

The cuts include about 950 positions at stores and another 70 at the company's headquarters and distribution centers, the Brooklyn Park, Minn.-based company said in a statement Thursday. The closings in addition to the 28 stores to be shuttered this month and as many as 50 lease terminations already planned by the money-losing 598-store chain.

Company spokeswoman Linda Angelacci said today that 10 people would be laid off when a Las Vegas distribution center closes in mid-February. She said those employees could transfer to the consolidated distribution center in Minneapolis, but they would compete for jobs with hundreds of laid-off workers.

The company has three Wilsons The Leather Experts stores in Southern Nevada -- at the Galleria at Sunset mall, the Las Vegas Outlet Center (formerly Belz) and Fashion Outlets Las Vegas in Primm -- and two stores branded as Wilsons Suede and Leather at the Boulevard and the Meadows malls. Angelacci said none of those stores would be closed.

Wilsons has been closing stores and reducing the number of local employees it has ever since it entered the Southern Nevada market.

A home-grown Las Vegas luggage retailer, El Portal, merged with Wilsons in 2000.

In its heyday, El Portal, founded in Las Vegas in 1936, had 38 operations across the United States staffed by 500 employees. When Wilsons acquired it, the company kept El Portal as a separate division, but consolidated operations and jobs to cut costs.

In 2002, Wilsons decided to move El Portal's corporate headquarters to Minnesota, transferring 24 jobs there.

At the time of the transfer, the company had about 200 local employees in 14 stores, some branded with the Wilsons name, one known as the California Luggage Outlet and others as El Portal. Eventually, those were consolidated to the five existing stores and a distribution center.

Wilsons has lost money in eight out of the past 10 quarters as sales fell an average of 5.5 percent the past five quarters.

"They obviously need to cut costs because they've not been making money," said William Armstrong, an analyst at C.L. King & Associates.

Shares of Wilsons, which sells coats, handbags, wallets and gloves, declined 31 percent last year.