They want this bunny would hop proper out of city.
After almost getting booted from downtown Nantucket final summer season as a result of a chain-store ban, well-liked teen and tween sleepwear/life-style retailer Curler Rabbit discovered a intelligent workaround and managed to take care of its standing as an island locale.
Now, some residents are hare-raising mad about it.
The playful PJ store — with 13 different brick-and-mortar areas throughout the nation, promoting some matching units that ring up at over $200 — just lately reopened for the season after rebranding as “The Curler Rabbit Basic Retailer,” with a two-year lease, new signage and in-store choices to suit beneath the native guidelines, adopted in 2006, that prohibit chain retailers.
“The downtown is the crown jewel of the island, and we’re giving it away to off-island large cash,” lamented Julie Biondi, who beforehand operated the realm’s The Beautiful clothes retailer.
Curler Rabbit’s Centre Avenue retailer opened its doorways final summer season at 44 Centre St., after which it was rapidly met with a July 7 metropolis enforcement order requiring it to “instantly stop all enterprise exercise,” reported the Nantucket Present. The order gave the impression to be the primary time the ban had been enforced.
The unique bylaw acknowledged, partially: “The proliferation of components companies may have a unfavourable affect on the island’s economic system, historic relevance, and distinctive character and financial vitality. These makes use of are due to this fact prohibited to be able to keep a novel retail and eating expertise. Components companies frustrate this purpose by detracting from the general historic island expertise and threatening its vacationer economic system.”
In response, the store revamped away from providing solely RR-branded gadgets — that are a preppy hallmark of the shop’s different nationwide areas — to promoting different manufacturers that come from each native and nationwide retailers.
“The shop shall be a wholly distinctive idea — not a Curler Rabbit mono-brand retailer, however a multi-brand retail idea with 50% or much less of the product belonging to Curler Rabbit,” Hānnah Kinser-Sampedro, the model’s vp of visible merchandising and retailer design, wrote to Nantucket Constructing Commissioner Paul Murphy in a Jan. 22, 2026, e mail obtained by the Present.
After reviewing the shop’s adjustments, Murphy got here to the conclusion that the shop was inside its rights to function anew.
Native resident Biondi stated that the tide of rising retailers trying to arrange store in Nantucket — like Tuckernuck and Doen — are “primarily simply billboards,” including that small companies are merely “going to get squeezed out” and changed by “chainlet shops.”
Nantucket must “overhaul the legal guidelines to say after getting 10 shops, you possibly can’t renew your lease on this Island,” she proposed.
“It’s an enormous situation, and I really really feel nobody on-island actually cares as a result of they don’t store downtown, however finally it can have an effect on everybody’s actual property values,” Biondi informed the Present. “I do know the entire native store house owners are discouraged and upset, however they’re so busy attempting to maintain their companies working that all of it feels overwhelming.
“Is the horse already out of the barn?”
The bylaw doesn’t apply to grocery shops, in addition to grandfathered-in companies, together with Ralph Lauren and Lilly Pulitzer, that arrange operations earlier than it was adopted.
