A ladies’ clothing boutique that has catered to generations of Winter Park socialites from its storefront at the corner of Park Ave and New England Ave will soon be empty.
It’s not by choice.
After more than three decades in this space and 40 years in business, Tuni Trendy + Chic is closing its doors at 301 S Park Ave. The owners received a letter from their landlord last week saying they had 30 days to vacate.
“We knew we would have to move at some point,” said Paige Blackwelder, part of the mother-daughter duo with mom Tuni Blackwelder, who has owned the swanky store since 1986. Their first location was down the street, and the store moved to its current space 33 years ago.
The lease was up, and the new owners didn’t want to renew it.
“They had let us know they wanted a national tenant, and so we knew that it would happen at some point,” she said. “We just thought that they [would] give us 90 days rather than 30 days.”
The property changed hands in late 2024 when University Park, FL-based Benderson Development purchased Park Plaza for $16.25 million. At the time, it represented the largest single transaction in the history of Winter Park’s Park Avenue, both in terms of property size and sales value. The 25,000-square-foot building has five retail spaces on the ground floor and the Park Plaza boutique hotel above. The corner store overlooking Central Park is considered one of the most iconic retail spaces in the Orlando metro.
Blackwelder said she is unaware of other tenants receiving the same letter and thought other businesses had more time on their leases. The other tenants in the building are BoVine Steakhouse, Pristine Nail & DaySpa, The Vintage Vault wine store, and Bebe Baby Boutique and Liz’s Fashion Experience.
Soon, shoppers won’t be able to pop into Tuni Trendy + Chic and grab that special something, like an off-the-shoulder short dress by Camilla for $749 or floral-print linen shorts by Cami NYC for $295, since the move needs to happen fast.
“It is a very short amount of time, and it gets shorter every day,” Blackwelder said.
They’re working with multiple brokers in hopes of finding another approximately 2,000-square-foot space but acknowledge that it might be a difficult task.
“We would love to stay on Park Avenue. We’ve been on Park Avenue for 40 years, so it’s our home, it’s where our community is, it’s where our people are,” she told GrowthSpotter. “But if we have to find some place in between while we’re still looking, hopefully it’ll be very close to Park Avenue. But we’re looking at all kinds of options.”
Those options might include having pop-up locations in temporary spaces.
“We’ve done even warehouse sales in the past, which have been off-location in unusual places, so something like that could be a fun idea,” she said, adding the pop-ups are a very temporary solution as new merchandise continues to arrive.
The Tuni team said the timing of all of this is the biggest struggle.
“My overall feeling is that it’s just difficult to find another space and move in 30 days. I just wish they’d given us 90 days. That would have been difficult enough,” she said. “But given the short amount of time we’re going to make something happen. I don’t know what it is, but it’ll be something.”
Paige and her mom, Tuni, made a video for social media, both announcing their 40th anniversary and their need to move.
“Letting all of our clients, our friends, our community know what was going on was important to us but was also hard to say we’re not going to be here any longer, we’ll be somewhere else, but it won’t be in this space,” Blackwelder said.
But the results of the video have surprised Blackwelder
“I have been overwhelmed by the reaction from the public,” she said. “We’ve had so many people offer to come and help us pack and move, but also the people that have said, ‘Oh, have you heard about this place? or ‘I have a friend that knows about that space.’ That’s been really amazing.”
No matter what, this isn’t the end for Tuni Trendy + Chic.
“We have been very fortunate to have been here for 33 years. This is a beautiful location. It’s a great space,” she said. “But there’ll be another space that’s great too. Our business is about us, our clients, our vendors, our staff, and not necessarily about the walls and the windows.”
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