Joy Brown, owner and founder of toy shop Young Reflections, said its store at the Centre City Mall lacked the foot traffic and sales required to remain viable.
It shut down at the end of last month.
Brown said she exhausted every effort to keep it from closing.
“There’s certainly going to be a lot of disappointed people,” she said.
“And I’m really sorry, but if it’s not paying its way, it can’t stay — that’s the sad part.
“I tried everything I could, but I just didn’t know what else to do.”
Brown said she opened the Dunedin store around eight years ago, first in Roslyn, to meet rising demand for quality, durable, and affordable children’s toys.
She had run the Young Reflections Invercargill store—which she said was thriving and not closing—for nearly 34 years.
“I had a lot of my Dunedin customers saying, ‘Please come up here; there’s nothing like you,’ and that was what our big point of difference was.”
“We have a lot of products that you just don’t find anywhere else in the city.”
She said she’d never encountered such tough business conditions before, with a “significant” sales drop-off in recent years.
“Twenty-plus years ago, most major towns and cities had an independent children’s book and toy shop.”
“But, over the years, as leases came up for renewal or people were of retiring age and couldn’t sell, they closed.”
Brown said the in-person experience of visiting a physical toy store remained highly important.
“People still like service — they like to come in and see what they’re buying.”
“They don’t want just to buy something online and then find, actually, no, it’s not what I wanted, or the quality is not what I wanted.”
Although prospective buyers showed interest, nothing concrete came of it, she said.
While Brown expressed disappointment, she said, “At the end of the day, you just have to make a hard call.”