Utah Portrait Studio Filing Chapter 7 Bankruptcy in a Flash

Countless memories may be lost as Kiddie Kandids, a photography studio for families and children, abruptly shuttered their doors.

Based in Utah, the company is filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy, after closing its 175 stores, according to a local ABC news report.

Founded in 1974, Kiddie Kandids specialized in newborn, infant, toddler and pre-school portrait photography. The more than 1,700 employees of Kiddie Kandids found out about the bankruptcy and subsequent closure of all of its locations via a letter from the company.

Those employees were all immediately out of a job, and they also learned that they would not be paid for the work that they had done for the last two weeks.

After the Chapter 7 bankruptcy and speedy shuttering of the Kiddie Kandids locations, many customers found that they couldn’t retrieve the family photos that they had taken of their kids at the stores.

Former Kiddie Kandids employee Jonathan Weaver of Salt Lake City was one such upset parent, who had to get special permission from the store’s management to retrieve his family photos off the store’s server before it was closed. “Management gave me permission to come in and access the computers and recover my family pictures before the corporate server goes down tonight,” he said.

Some customers trickled into that Salt Lake City location and were fortunate to find former employees there. One woman told ABC News 4 that her husband had seen a report on the news. “He told me to get down here right away and pickup the portfolio we bought a month ago,” she said. “I think it’s rotten they didn’t call!”

A representative from the Utah Better Business Bureau told ABC, “it’s a breach of business ethics. This company has an ethical obligation to stop taking orders when company directors see they’re going under and to notify customers and deliver all the products their customers paid for.”

According to a statement on the Kiddie Kandids web site, the “shutdown occurred as the result of an abrupt and unforeseen loss of funding from its banks.” The company also cited the difficult economic situation as a case of the Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing and the quick closing of its stores.

Because of these difficulties, lenders stopped providing the funding Kiddie Kandids needed to continue normal business operations, and the only option was to end those operations.

“We have exhausted all possible avenues for funding and have come to the end of the road,” the statement read. “This is truly unfortunate in light of the great team of employees and the great customers that made Kiddie Kandids a leading national children’s photography studio.”

The company statement also expressed the hope that if someone were to purchase Kiddie Kandids assets out of the bankruptcy, that they would hire back the employees that were recently let go.

Kiddie Kandids employees were let go so speedily that some were not sure where they would be the morning after the news came to the stores. Former employee Weaver told ABC, “looks like I’ll be hitting the streets first thing in the morning.”