Eastbay Ceasing Operations

Sports-performance retailer Eastbay is shuttering its operations, according to an announcement on its website. While the site for the unit of Foot Locker (New York) originally said the shutdown was effective Dec. 31, it has since been changed to say the closure will happen “soon.”

Founded in 1980, Eastbay was a direct-to-consumer brand for most of its existence. Foot Locker said the closure is to “a result of efforts to optimize distribution processes in order to serve its nationwide customers more efficiently and effectively,” Hypebeast reports.

In the meantime, the Eastbay site advises customers to look to Foot Locker’s Champs Sports unit, which the parent company merged with Eastbay in 2021. As featured in the June 2021 edition of VMSD, those two units opened their first combined store (and first and only brick-and-mortar locale for Eastbay) earlier that year in suburban Chicago.