Vose-Sanders Bootery to Close Winnetka Location

A Winnetka staple since the 1940s will be shutting its doors for the final time in the coming months, but owner Carol Sanders says the longstanding Vose-Sanders Bootery is going out on a high note.

“It’s really emotional to have to do this,” Sanders said of closing one of the area’s oldest retailers - one that has served as the area’s favorite spot for purchasing children’s shoes. “But it’s the right thing to do for the business and for me. We can now go with our head held high, whereas if we had waited three years, business may have slid a little.”

While Vose-Sanders has met many of the economic challenges at its Winnetka store as well as the one they had in Evanston which closed in 2011, Sanders said the writing on the wall was there to close when her late husband, Rick, fell sick a few years ago and passed away in October of 2012 from an acute leukemia.

“We started selling down in early November after we bought our final line of merchandise,” Sanders said. “But ever since people heard about us closing - dozens have come in maybe not to buy anything, but just to say goodbye and let us know how much they liked having us here.”

Among those challenges were when Nordstrom’s, a store with an expansive children’s shoe department, opened at the Old Orchard shopping center in 1994 with the economic recession in 2008.

“It was a good kick in the pants,” Sanders told the Winnetka Chamber of Commerce regarding the addition of Nordstrom’s to the community. “It motivated us to totally gut and renovate both of our stores, discontinue slow-selling brands and attend more national shoe shows to pick out new shoe brands.”

The recession also provided a good challenge - but one they were able to get through.

“Our community was hit particularly hard,” Sanders said, noting that many Winnetka residents work in the financial industry and other professions that took big hits from the economic downturn.

The history of Vose-Sanders Bootery on the North Shore began when the Vose family opened up the Evanston location in 1922 and then added a Winnetka location for a few years until a move was made to Elm Street in the mid 1940s. When the original owner passed away in 1962, Ted and Wanda Sanders - Sanders’ in-laws - purchased the Evanston location and three years later the spot in Winnetka.

Rick, who as a teenager decided to help his father during the always busy back-to-school time, ended up taking a huge interest in his parents’ business and eventually bought them out in 1989.

“He thought he was just going to do it for one year, but one year became two and before you know it 42 years,” Sanders said of her late husband.

There have been other local shoe stores in Winnetka over the last few decades, but while the others would focus on adults, Sanders said her husband’s store, which she joined to help in the office, organizing credit applications and financial statements.

“That’s always been our specialty,” she said.

And just as loyal as they have been to the village, the village has been loyal to them.

“Winnetka has been great,” Sanders said. “We couldn’t ask for a better community.”

According to the Chamber, many of the children who were fitted for shoes at Vose-Sanders Bootery grew up to become nationally prominent Americans. Among the shoe sizes checked at the children’s shoe specialty store were those of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the late Blackhawks Owner Bill Wirtz, television marketing pioneer A.C. Nielsen, and actors Rock Hudson, Bill Murray and Chris O’Donnell, who was in the store just a couple of months ago to buy shoes with one of his sons.

Sanders, a graduate of law school at DePaul and one who keeps up her law license, says that while shoes were a late passion in her life, they “grab you more so than the law.”

“We’ve had some wonderful experiences on buying trips and trade shows,” she recalls. “At the World Shoe Association Conference in Las Vegas, we would see celebrities like Jay Leno and Robin Williams in a private ballroom for all the shoe vendors and buyers.”

Although the store’s lease does not expire until April, Sanders says she is targeting a closing date of January 31 or “whenever we can sell all the shoes.”

Until then, merchandise can be purchased at a discount rate. What was originally a store-wide 20 percent discount is now 30 percent.

“And we will keep dropping,” Sanders said.