Kira Plastinina is the economy’s latest victim. The 16-year-old Russian, uh, designer has decided to mostly exit the U.S. market. Or rather, her father and orange-juice magnate Sergei Plastinin has. They’ll shut almost all of her twelve U.S. stores less than a year after they opened and focus on their 70 Russian outposts. “The number of shoppers in the U.S. fell significantly,” Sergei told Bloomberg. “It also became much harder to find money for investment because of the financial crisis. We had enormous plans: New York, then India and China in 2009.” Just one or two U.S. stores will remain open, and the rest will close by the end of the year. Indeed, we hardly saw anyone aside from the employees inside Kira’s stores here. That’s right — we went in on more than one occasion and got a good chuckle out of the pants with the zipper vent in the ass region that never should have seen the daylight, much less in a teeny-bopper store. The Russian market, however, loves Plastinina. Sales in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan could reach $70 million this year, and monthly same-store sales in these countries are rising more than 30 percent. But there is an upside to all of this: the going-out-of-business sales. Inappropriate pants, here we come!
Teenage Russian Fashion Designer Plastinina Retreats From U.S. [Bloomberg]
Related: The Russian-American Princess [NYM]
