Description

JOANN (forever “Joann Fabrics” in our hearts) didn’t just “go out of business,” it was engineered to collapse. In this episode of our series The Private Equity Playbook, host Manpreet Kaur Kalra is joined by collaborator Anna Canning to trace how a beloved craft-store chain went from being a hub for makers to a debt-loaded financial instrument. 

This isn’t a story about changing consumer tastes or “retail trends.” It’s actually about debt, extraction, and what happens when the logic of Wall Street collides with the fabric of daily life. 

From JOANN's origins in Cleveland’s garment-manufacturing era to its pandemic boom and rapid collapse, we break down what happens when private equity enters the picture: a leveraged buyout that loads a company with debt, management fees that drain resources, and cost-cutting that hollows out the very labor and expertise the business depends on. Along the way, we connect JOANN’s downfall to the rise of fast fashion, the history of DIY economics, and the way private equity continues to enter our lives. 

In this episode, we explore:

• How Joann Fabrics went from zero debt to total collapse after a private equity-led leveraged buyout loaded the company with over a billion dollars in obligations and ongoing management fees.
• What a leveraged buyout actually is, and how private equity firms use company debt, not their own money, to finance acquisitions and extract returns.
• The history of U.S. garment manufacturing, from unionized apparel hubs like Cleveland to offshoring, fast fashion, and the shift of sewing from necessity to hobby.
• How private equity hollowed out JOANN's core strengths (the expertise of its employees) while using a brief boom during the pandemic to obscure deep structural damage, and how JOANN's collapse rippled outward to destabilize adjacent industries.
• The bipartisan political support underpinning private equity’s takeover of our lives and why consumer choice can’t solve this.

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