The imminent closing of the Company C store on Storrs Street is a sad surprise to many local customers. The even bigger surprise is that the company itself isn’t closing.

“I think what people did not realize is that [the store] has never been our core business. To some degree, it was a little bit of a passion project,” said Walter Chapin, who co-founded the company 31 years ago with his wife, Christine. “The store has always been the tail and not the body of business. The other 80% or 90% of our customers around the country don’t even know that we have stores.”

While the firm is getting out of its physical retail location, it will double down on its long-running online presence.

The founders explained in a post on the company’s website. “We want to emphasize that Company C is not closing. We’re evolving to meet changing market demands and focusing on what we do best and most.”

The Chapins, who are both 64, will keep their business based in the Concord area, with a warehouse in Penacook where they fill and ship orders and an administrative office and design studio for product development.

The company has about 18 employees and does “single digit millions” in sales annually, Chapin said.

He and his wife founded Company C in 1994 in a garage behind their home on Auburn Street to provide an outlet for their desire to create colorful textiles. They soon opened a store and eventually expanded into selling furniture, accessories, rugs and fabrics that emphasize surprising colors and patterns. The store was first on Airport Road then on Old Turnpike Road, where they operated for 15 years until moving to Storrs Street in March 2020.

Right from the beginning, they thought beyond selling only to people who walked into a store.

“When we started the company we had visions of grandeur, of being national,” Chapin said. “I personally like technology, so quite early on we wanted to have a website to set the tone nationally.”

They had an early website, and by 2008, they had an e-commerce site where they could sell products they designed locally and had made in India and China. Being in control of their online sales, rather than outsourcing it to Amazon or the like, has been central to their success.

They now sell through national retailers such L.L. Bean and Garnet Hill, plus 300 other home furnishing stores and hundreds of designers around the country. The result: Despite the store, “We do more business in Florida, Massachusetts and many other states than in the state of New Hampshire,” he said.

Once the Concord store closes, the company will stop selling furniture and gifts, concentrating instead on their core business of decorative area rugs.

Chapin said they saw problems with Chinese production early and moved everything to India several years ago, which has allowed them to avoid much of President Trump’s erratic tariff promises. While it’s unclear exactly which tariffs will go into effect when, Chapin said he assumes that Indian production will see a 10% tariff this summer, which will be passed on to customers.

While that won’t be good for business, he noted that “our competitors are faced with the same issue.”

David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com