Scenic Route Announces Liquidation Sale & Closure

Scenic Route announced today in an email to customers that they are holding a liquidation sale in preparation for shutting down the company.

Scenic Route is owned by Jim and Sarah Milne, and based in Saratoga Springs, Utah.  Sarah Milne was a paper designer for Rusty Pickle before starting Scenic Route. A little over a year ago the six-year-old company was flying high in the scrapbooking world. According to the liquidation announcement, the company had its best month ever in August 2008. But the company says it was hard hit by the economic crash of Sept. 2008, which has lead to its liquidation:

Thanks to you, Scenic Route had growth year after year culminating in our best month ever in August 2008. Unfortunately, September 2008 brought economic hardships to our company, the scrapbook industry, and this nation.

Nicole Snow, who recently stopped writing the Salt Lake City Scrapbooking Examiner, came out of blogging retirement to tell the scrapbook world about Scenic Route's closure:

I was suprised to see that their booth at the Scrapbook USA Expo this month had new paper lines available at a discount. Typically the Scenic Route booth has discounted stickers and chipboard, but their paper tends to remain a bit high-priced (at least by Expo standards).

Looking back further, it's easy to see that as early as January of this year there were economic concerns at Scenic Route when they laid off well-known designer/instructor Layle Koncar, who was quickly snapped up by Basic Grey. Then in July, the company skipped exhibiting at CHA-Summer 2009 in Orlando, and did not release new product either. This was perhaps understandable given the birth of Sarah Milne's new baby barely a month before CHA, but the timing couldn't have been worse for an obviously wounded company.

Scenic Route is holding its liquidation sale on its web store for consumers, and they'll also have booths at two Scrapbook Expos in California in October.