Chivalry isn't dead. It's just changing its face.
On Friday, Chivalry Sports, a Renaissance-themed clothing and gear store, is closing its physical location at 4620 E. Speedway and will operate online only.
Owner Gael Stirler and her husband and business partner, Jake Stirler, will lay off two full-time workers and reduce a full-timer to part time when Chivalry closes its doors at 6 p.m. Friday. The business started as a catalog in 1991, went online in 1995 and opened at another location in 1996.
"We'll be working for nothing for a while," Gael Stirler said. "We lost $25,000 in March. That's more than some people make in a year. We've had to pour our own savings into the company just to keep it going."
Chivalry Sports is one of the largest resources of its kind in the country, selling Renaissance clothing, armor, swords and other weapons. Revelers shopped at Chivalry to dress up for the annual Arizona Renaissance Festival and Artisan Market in Apache Junction, as well as the Florence-set Estrella War, which is the second-largest festival of the Society for Creative Anachronism.
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Reagan Guthrie, a 36-year-old accountant, is administrator (or "seneschal") of the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Guthrie, who shopped regularly for weapons and holsters at Chivalry, called the store's closing a "heartbreaking" loss for the local community.
"A lot of our new people who come into the group for the first time don't know how to sew or make their own things," Guthrie said. "We'd direct them to Chivalry Sports, and they'd be able to integrate into the local group much quicker."
Hope abounds with the online-only format, because Stirler estimates that more than 80 percent of the store's sales took place at the store's Web site, www.renstore. com She said Chivalry needed a physical presence primarily as a place to store the merchandise for shipping all around the country, as well to house the computers she needed to support the self-hosted site. Stirler said the company spent at least $6,500 a month on salaries, maintenance and software support just to be able to sell online.
Next week the company will switch to remote servers that will cost only $60 monthly.
The recession knocked sales cold, causing the company to lose a total of $80,000 from November 2008 to March. Sales have been up since, and the company has been profitable since it announced it was going out of business, no longer restocked inventory and slashed prices between 30 percent and 60 percent on all items. But that wasn't nearly enough to make up for the losses.
It wasn't until she began the process of shutting down Chivalry's physical operation that Stirler discovered she could save so much money by switching to off-site, virtual servers. If she'd made the switch a year ago, she said, she might not have had to close down the store. She had looked into virtual servers two years ago, but the technology was not up to her standards.
"We have no choice but to close," Stirler said. "We have to go out of business."
The online store will continue to sell clothing and most gear, but not weapons, which are awkward to ship, Stirler said.
Stirler said the process of closing has been hard on her. She's slept little, suffered indigestion and broken down crying a couple of times. She's watched her store, which first opened at another location in 1996, fall apart piece by piece, since Chivalry is selling absolutely everything in the building, including racks and fixtures.
Chivalry had 30 employees before 2001, when it gradually scaled down to eight employees by the beginning of 2008 due to decreased sales. Now the company consists of five employees, including the owners, and will include just one paid part-timer for a monthlong transition period.
"We have to kind of assume the worst," she said. "That it won't work and we'll have to go out and get jobs."
On the Web
• Chivalry Sports/The Renaissance Store: www.renstore.com