After nearly getting booted from downtown Nantucket last summer due to a chain-store ban, popular teen and tween sleepwear/lifestyle retailer Roller Rabbit found a clever workaround and managed to maintain its status as an island locale.
Now, some residents are hare-raising mad about it.
The playful PJ shop — with 13 other brick-and-mortar locations across the country, selling some matching sets that ring up at over $200 — recently reopened for the season after rebranding as “The Roller Rabbit General Store,” with a two-year lease, new signage and in-store offerings to fit under the local rules, adopted in 2006, that prohibit chain retailers.
“The downtown is the crown jewel of the island, and we are giving it away to off-island big money,” lamented Julie Biondi, who previously operated the area’s The Lovely clothing store.
Roller Rabbit’s Centre Street store opened its doors last summer at 44 Centre St., after which it was quickly met with a July 7 city enforcement order requiring it to “immediately cease all business activity,” reported the Nantucket Current. The order appeared to be the first time the ban had been enforced.
The original bylaw stated, in part: “The proliferation of formula businesses will have a negative impact on the island’s economy, historical relevance, and unique character and economic vitality. These uses are therefore prohibited in order to maintain a unique retail and dining experience. Formula businesses frustrate this goal by detracting from the overall historic island experience and threatening its tourist economy.”
Nantucket’s 2006-approved chain store ban prohibits large retailers from setting up shop. Getty Images In response, the shop revamped away from offering solely RR-branded items — which are a preppy hallmark of the store’s other national locations — to selling other brands that come from both local and national retailers.
“The store will be an entirely unique concept — not a Roller Rabbit mono-brand store, but a multi-brand retail concept with 50% or less of the product belonging to Roller Rabbit,” Hānnah Kinser-Sampedro, the brand’s vice president of visual merchandising and store design, wrote to Nantucket Building Commissioner Paul Murphy in a Jan. 22, 2026, email obtained by the Current.
The Roller Rabbit General Store is a unique location for the RR brand. Roller Rabbit/Facebook After reviewing the store’s changes, Murphy came to the conclusion that the store was within its rights to operate anew.
Local resident Biondi said that the tide of growing retailers looking to set up shop in Nantucket — like Tuckernuck and Doen — are “essentially just billboards,” adding that small businesses are simply “going to get squeezed out” and replaced by “chainlet stores.”
Nantucket needs to “overhaul the laws to say once you have 10 stores, you can’t renew your lease on this Island,” she proposed.
“It’s a huge issue, and I truly feel no one on-island really cares because they don’t shop downtown, but eventually it will affect everyone’s real estate values,” Biondi told the Current. “I know all of the local shop owners are discouraged and upset, but they are so busy trying to keep their businesses running that it all feels overwhelming.
“Is the horse already out of the barn?”
The bylaw does not apply to grocery stores, as well as grandfathered-in businesses, including Ralph Lauren and Lilly Pulitzer, that set up operations before it was adopted.
