Bodega, the Secret Sneaker Store, Is Back Open Amid Finan…

For a moment there, it looked like Bodega might be done. The iconic sneaker store had closed its original Boston location in January. The business was bogged down—placing an online order came with a risk that your purchase might not be processed and shipped for weeks. In mid-March, Bodega co-founder Dan Natola sent a note around the industry that he was stepping down from his role as director of brand strategy. Days later, other Bodega employees updated their social media profiles and posted messages about losing their jobs. On March 21, Bodega shut down its LA location and online store, halting all business.

Jay Gordon, another of the co-founders and the majority shareholder, maintained that Bodega would be back. He wanted, he said, to find a way to keep the LA and online stores running. The Bodega website is still inaccessible and showing an “intermission” message at the time of writing, but the LA store reopened on Thursday.

“We are scaling back enormously,” Gordon told Complex via email in March. “We are shutting almost all corporate operations but keeping the LA store open, after a brief shutdown, and running all operations out of there to save money, and hopefully start to get back on track.”

Natola declined to comment for this story, directing our inquiries to Gordon.

Bodega opened in Boston in 2006, taking streetwear exclusivity to an architectural extreme by hiding the shop behind a secret door in a storefront made to look like a regular corner store. The store made a name for itself first through collaborations with Boston-based sneaker brands like Converse, Reebok, and Saucony. Bodega opened an LA location in 2018 that was, in keeping with the theme of the first store, hidden in an old produce market.

By the 2020s, Bodega was an institutional boutique, a forebearer that had arrived before sneaker collecting, and the idea of shops catering specifically to collectors, went fully mainstream. In an interview with Sneaker Freaker in March, Gordon said 2021 was Bodega’s best year on record. Gordon told Complex that at its peak Bodega was doing $35 million in sales.

Former Bodega employee Gavin Hui, who worked there as a buyer, said that Bodega benefited from the same pandemic-era boost that provided so many other sneaker stores with a steady flow of cash.

“We were just hitting record years,” Hui said. “I mean, we were doing really big business. I think 2023 is definitely when I recognized that things were being a little weird, because we started doing some major changes with the business—more on the backend.”

Where did things go wrong? The growth didn’t last; Adidas Yeezy sales cratered, Nike cooled off, and Bodega ran into trouble with Bergen Logistics, the third-party partner it had hired to handle product warehousing and fulfillment. 

Hui said that while Bodega had done fulfillment in-house before, employing its own staff to process orders, it switched to the third-party provider when orders picked up in the early 2020s. When sales slowed down, Hui said, the arrangement with Bergen Logistics lost its purpose. He added that the company never totally solved Bodega’s problems with delays.

“Thinking back right now,” Hui said, “we did have a lot of delayed orders during those years where we in-housed our fulfillment, and then when we switched to [third-party logistics], we still had issues.”

Years back, a good chunk of the East Coast’s limited edition sneaker business ran through the New Jersey-based Bergen Logistics. Bodega, Kith, Packer Shoes, and Sneakersnstuff all relied on Bergen to get their orders out. Those stores have moved on save for Kith, which still uses Bergen in Canada.

One sneaker retailer who used to use Bergen Logistics for fulfillment told Complex the company’s warehouses in New Jersey could get backed up, creating a domino effect that made it difficult for individual accounts to get goods to online shoppers in a timely manner. And, the retailer said, if any payments were late, stores ran the risk of Bergen Logistics effectively holding their stock hostage.

“If you are late by one day,” the retailer said, “they basically say to you, ‘If you don’t pay us, we’re not shipping your orders.’”

Gordon told Complex that Bodega was profitable for the first 17 years of its existence but took on debt in the past few years after its move to outsource fulfillment went haywire.

“We had a lot of problems with fulfillment in our Boston operation,” Gordon said, “and then with an outside company, and got into a situation where our debt payments were crippling.”

For a while, Bodega shopped around the world for investors who could save the business. A few of those talks are still active.

“We got very close with a couple companies, but couldn’t get across the finish line,” Gordon said. “A lot of international companies were nervous about the political climate in the US.”

With debts mounting, Gordon faced the possibility of shutting the business down altogether earlier this year. In his interview with Sneaker Freaker, the Bodega co-founder said he’d considered pulling the plug until a friend at Nike offered to help Bodega navigate its way back to normalcy. Bodega was spared, but its employees were not. In the same week that the stores closed, almost all of Bodega’s staff were let go.

Around 30 people lost their jobs when Gordon decided to cut the staff down to a bare minimum as he scrambled to keep Bodega alive. While Hui could see the writing on the wall, the end still felt abrupt.

“There were definitely things that could have been better,” the former Bodega buyer said, “but they had to make a tough decision and they had to do it just to keep the company alive, and I completely understand it, and definitely no hard feelings.”

There is some discontent among other former employees. One told Complex that they were still waiting on payment for work they’d done for Bodega. Gordon said this week that everyone who was laid off has been paid in full.

What remains of the Bodega staff? Gordon didn’t put a number on the amount of employees left but described it as a “small core group” that would need to be scrappy in order to right the ship.

“It’s just the small LA staff, a bookkeeper, and me,” Gordon said.

Natola and Oliver Mak, Bodega’s other co-founders, are no longer involved in the day-to-day business but remain part owners, according to Gordon.

It won’t be an easy road back for Bodega. There’s a tariff war threatening the economics of global footwear trade, industry leader Nike is struggling, and other sneaker boutiques are fighting to stay open. Although Hui is no longer with the company, he is hopeful that Gordon can orchestrate a turnaround.

Gordon’s focus now is reviving the LA and online stores—reopening Boston would require outside investment. Gordon knows that he can’t bring Bodega back to life quickly but believes he can do it. 

“We are going to try to make things right,” Bodega’s co-founder said, “with our customers, with our vendors, and with the legacy that has been tarnished.”