Three immigrant couples, one shop and a name made from two daughters.

Joann’s story starts in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1943. English Wikipedia says that three couples of German immigrants, Hilda and Berthold Reich, Sigmund and Mathilda Rohrbach and Justin and Alma Zimmerman, opened a store called the Cleveland Fabric Shop that year. The company kept that date at the centre of its own story: its “About Us” page, as archived in 2023, opened with the words “Since 1943” and described how it had grown from a fabric destination into a shop for sewing, knitting, crocheting, crafting and seasonal home decorating.

The name came twenty years later. According to Wikipedia, the business was renamed Jo-Ann Fabrics in 1963, and the new name was built from the names of daughters in the founding families, Joan and Jacqueline Ann. The hyphen kept the two parts visible, so the name read as a person’s first name while also carrying two of them.

The business went public in 1969, Wikipedia says, trading on the American Stock Exchange under a corporate name, Fabri-Centers of America, Inc., while the stores themselves carried the Jo-Ann name. For almost three decades the listed company and the shopfront brand used different names. The company grew by buying other fabric chains: Wikipedia records the purchase of Cloth World, a southern chain, in 1994, and of House of Fabrics in 1998, a deal the Los Angeles Times reported on 2 February 1998. House of Fabrics had itself traded under several names, including Fabricland, Fabric King and So-Fro Fabrics, so the acquisitions brought a number of older store names under one roof.

In September 1998 the corporate and shopfront names were brought together. Wikipedia, citing a Business Journal report dated 1 September 1998, says the company changed its name to Jo-Ann Stores, Inc. and renamed its stores Jo-Ann Fabrics. From then on the company that filed accounts and the sign over the door shared the same name. The company later based itself in Hudson, Ohio, south of Cleveland.

A private-equity owner, a new spelling, two filings and a new owner for the name.

Ownership changed in the following decade. Wikipedia says Jo-Ann Stores agreed in March 2010 to be acquired by the private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners, and that the company was taken off the stock exchange in 2011.

The biggest change to the brand name came in 2018. Wikipedia says Jo-Ann Stores rebranded as Joann that year, describing the change as a way to move beyond fabrics and take in a wider range of crafts. Adweek covered the change on 30 July 2018 under the headline “Following Its Rebrand, Joann Is No Longer Your Mom’s Fabric Store”. The hyphen was dropped, the word “Fabrics” no longer led the name, and Wikipedia notes that the new name was stylised in capitals, as JOANN. The company’s own pages from that period used warm, informal phrases, inviting shoppers to find their “Happy Place” and promising “Aisles of Smiles”. Its stated mission was “To inspire the creative spirit in each of us — our customers and ourselves.”

Joann returned to the stock market in March 2021. Wikipedia says the company listed on the Nasdaq on 16 March 2021 under the ticker JOAN, with Leonard Green & Partners keeping a majority stake.

The next years were marked by restructuring. On 18 March 2024 Joann filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to the court docket and a Bloomberg report of the same date cited by Wikipedia. The Akron Beacon Journal reported on 25 April 2024 that the company would emerge from that process as a private company. On 15 January 2025 Joann filed for Chapter 11 a second time, which Wikipedia supports with a Reuters report of that date. In February 2025, Wikipedia says, the company moved to liquidate its remaining stores after failing to find a buyer for the business, with its assets sold to GA Group. The last Joann stores closed on 30 May 2025.

The name did not disappear with the stores. CNN reported on 5 June 2025 that Michaels, the Texas-based arts and crafts retailer, had bought Joann’s intellectual property, including its name, along with its private-label brands, though not its stores. CNN reported that products from Joann’s Big Twist yarn and fabric label were being developed as part of the Michaels portfolio, and said no specific plans had been announced for the Joann name itself. Michaels has owned the Joann name since 2025.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are craft and home-specialty retailers, a kind of business whose identity lives mostly in its shops. A craft or homeware chain usually sells many other companies’ products, so what it owns is the name over the door, the layout of the aisles, the bags and receipts, the weekly flyer and, sometimes, a range of own-label goods made for it by suppliers.

That makes a retailer’s identity harder to pin down than a product brand’s. Signage changes with each store refit, catalogues and flyers are thrown away, and when a chain is sold or closes, its name and leases can pass to different owners at different times. A name that once covered a run of stores may later survive only as a website, a trademark or a memory.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record — the founding, the changes of owner, any closure or sale of assets — from what the company says about itself, and leaves out what cannot be documented. Where a chain has closed or been sold, the guide says so plainly and gives the dates.

A name that was simplified three times.

Joann’s identity is best read through its name, because the name is what changed most. It began as a place-and-product description, the Cleveland Fabric Shop. In 1963 it became a personal name built from two daughters’ names, Jo-Ann, with the word Fabrics attached. For years after the 1969 listing the company itself was called Fabri-Centers of America, a name shoppers would rarely have seen, while the stores said Jo-Ann. The 1998 change to Jo-Ann Stores closed that gap.

The 2018 rebrand took the process a step further. Dropping the hyphen turned two names into a single word, and moving away from “Fabrics” let the brand speak for yarn, paper crafts, seasonal decor and other categories as well as cloth. Adweek’s headline that summer framed the change as a move away from the image of a parent’s fabric store.

The voice changed with it. Phrases on the company’s own pages such as “Aisles of Smiles” and “Happy Place” were cheerful and domestic, and the mission statement spoke of inspiring “the creative spirit” in customers and staff alike.

The private labels are now part of the story too. Big Twist, the yarn and fabric label named in CNN’s 2025 report, is the clearest example of a Joann-created name continuing under a new owner. The Joann name itself now belongs to Michaels, and CNN reported that no specific plans had been announced for it at the time of the purchase.

The places remain part of the record. Cleveland is where the first shop opened in 1943, and Hudson, Ohio, is where the company was based in its later years. The history also connects Joann with older fabric chains whose names it absorbed, from Cloth World to House of Fabrics, before its own stores closed in 2025.

For a design guide, Joann shows how a retail name can be simplified over time: from a descriptive shop name to a hyphenated pair of first names and finally to one capitalised word meant to cover every craft. Compare the retailer that bought the name in our Michaels brand guidelines and another fabric chain whose name Michaels also acquired in our Hancock Fabrics brand guidelines. For this guide we use spool teal, thread gold and calico cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Joann’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.