ASHEVILLE – Citizen Vinyl will close its store and café, which have brought music, food, drinks and entertainment to downtown guests for more than four years.
On April 30, Citizen Vinyl will close its record and art store, event space and Session Café, which includes its bar, at 14 O. Henry Ave., in the Citizen-Times building, where it opened in October 2020.
The announcement was made on April 14, two days after National Record Store Day, during which independent record shops are celebrated and special deals, programs and events are offered.
However, founder and CEO Gar Ragland told the Citizen Times that Citizen Vinyl’s fate was months in the making due to the business’s sales decline.
Ragland said that while the company survived the pandemic, Tropical Storm Helene was too much for the public-facing components. The storm hit Asheville on Sept. 27, the beginning of the leaf season, traditionally when more tourists visit the area and bring in higher sales for local businesses.
“We were fully prepared for what we were hoping was going to be the best quarter of our company’s history last fall,” Ragland said. “Then on the dawn of the fourth quarter, when we were eagerly anticipating all the tourists coming to town, Hurricane Helene hit. It annihilated our fourth quarter revenue.”
Citizen Vinyl revamped its store and cafe in 2022.
He said it impacted the situation and the health of the business for the following six months, which he said had been the worst the company’s experienced.
Ragland said that before Helene, the non-manufacturing side of the business, which includes the café and store, employed eight to 10 people, who were laid off due to the storm. Factors like decreased customer traffic prevented the business from rehiring at full capacity, and only four of those workers returned.
Citizen Vinyl retained 12 manufacturing staff members through Helene, who will continue with the company.
After Helene, Citizen Vinyl was transformed to aid community members, including preparing and distributing free, hot meals. Local chef Michelle Bailey led the operations. WiFi, electricity, supplies, drinking water, and communal space were also offered.
“We’ve always put our community first, and we worked hard to make our event space and manufacturing segments on the first floor as strong and successful as possible,” Ragland said. “But it’s become clearer now than ever that what we need to do is to focus on the core of our business, given these recent challenges.”
Ragland said he remains hopeful that Citizen Vinyl will find a partner or business to take over the space.
In March 2024, the Citizen Times newsroom moved out of the building, which had been built for the newspaper in 1939. The building has offices rented out to several other businesses.
What’s next for Citizen Vinyl?
In this next phase, Citizen Vinyl, North Carolina’s first vinyl record pressing plant, will strengthen its focus on the success and growth of its manufacturing facility and recording studio operations, which will remain in the Citizen-Times building.
“Hurricane Helene required us to focus on the things that we do best, which is making high-quality vinyl records and creating great, new, original music in the studio,” Ragland said.
He said the vinyl industry is highly competitive and changing. Still, Citizen Vinyl is on the verge of ground-breaking technology that will put it ahead in the market and maintain its national reputation as an innovative, award-winning, high-quality vinyl-pressing plant.
A customer orders from Citizen Vinyl’s Session Cafe in 2022.
Development plans are underway to enhance the Citizen Vinyl’s recently patented “vinyl key.” A record is pressed with an embedded NFC (near-field communication) tag and a unique splatter pattern that allows users to tap the center label of a record with their phone to access additional digital assets, album information, and register ownership and proof of authenticity.
“We’re about to launch some high-profile projects with some major industry artists in the next few months that we hope is going to accelerate the growth of our business,” Ragland said.
Citizen Vinyl’s plan includes reinforcing its sustainable BioVinyl (made from recycled materials), hi-fidelity in-house cassette reproduction, packaging and direct-to-consumer (D2C) fulfillment, which he said many independent artists and record label clients have requested.
The company also intends to launch a Citizen Vinyl record label, which Ragland said will help build the company’s profile. Citizen Studios will offer recording, engineering, and mastering services.
Factory and studio tours will resume to teach school groups and other visitors how vinyl records are made. The tour also includes historical details about the historic Citizen Times building and the WWNC radio station studio that was turned into Citizen Studios, as well as Asheville’s significance in developing American roots music.
“We wish we could have made it work,” Ragland said. “We take a lot of pride in what we created for Asheville, and we’re thankful to Asheville for enabling something like this to happen and to accommodate a bold vision that we’ve had at Citizen Vinyl.”
For more information, visit citizenvinyl.com/record-press/ and citizenvinyl.com/citizen-studios/.
Tiana Kennell is the food and dining reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Tips, comments, questions? Email tkennell@citizentimes.com or follow @PrincessOfPage on Instagram/Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Citizen Vinyl closing record store, café due dismal sales post-Helene
