Photo by Stacie Joy
Boris & Horton is done to its last few days on the NW corner of Avenue A and 12th Street. Or are they?
In announcing their schedule this last week on Instagram, they wrote: "we're hopeful that one of our customers will be taking over and reopening in 2025."
This has been the home to the city's first dog cafe for the past six-plus years.
Earlier this month, ownership (daughter-father Logan Mikhly and Coppy Holzman) posted notices that they would close at the end of November. This development happened even after a successful crowdfunding campaign and a newly enacted subscription plan earlier this year.
From an Instagram post on Nov. 11:
Despite these efforts, we've experienced a significant drop in our monthly subscriptions, with almost 90% churn, and our sales are slightly down compared to last year when we initially made the difficult decision to close.
Mikhly and Holzman said they've previously met with potential suitors but have yet to close a deal.
The retail space remains on the rental market.
Still, it sounds like they are keeping the faith this Thanksgiving week...
4 comments:
I am not a city pet person; but they were good neighbors and helped bring some stability to an ever changing area that is fraught with business that come and go much like the newer residents of the neighborhood- they come and do the bars and partying for a couple years then move on leaving no sense of community.
Didn't they raise a lot of money through a GoFundMe or some other kind of drive? What happened to that?
Of course I do not know the full circumstances, but it seems to me collecting a cool quarter million directly from your neighbors and then deciding to close after ten months is not good form, especially when you are already so resourced. Also, advertising an event planner job on CL for ... wait for it.... $90K/year ten minutes after cashing the Go Fund Me tells me you know too little about how to run a business. Looks like they used those marketing skills to get cash to support the rent for the last ten months but did nothing to solve the original problems. If you limited the amount of time your regulars just sat around on laptops, maybe this would not have been the outcome. These Go Fund Me campaigns need to be provisional in my opinion. How many of us feel like we've been scammed?
I just hope that if Boris & Horton closes after all of this crowdfunding drama that they leave a note in their window that says “Peelin’ potatoes” in honor of that other crowdfunding disaster on Avenue A also known as Empire Biscuits. At least those donors got a jar of marmalade.
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