Kilwins owners Karen Burgess (left) and Chera Tramontin are closing the shop after nearly forty-three years. | J. Adrian Wylie

“I couldn’t have imagined that as a kid, I would have grown up here, and this would have been something my mom created and that I was able to take over. So I’m really proud of that. Not a lot of businesses make it this long.”

That’s Chera Tramontin’s preface to explaining why downtown sweets shop Kilwins is closing after nearly forty-three years on E. Liberty.

It began with a soon-to-be single mother, now known as Karen Burgess, wanting to open a store built around nuts. She found that such businesses typically offered chocolates too, so she went up north to visit the Petoskey-based confectioner founded in 1947. Kilwins’ second owners, Wayne and Lorene Rose, had only recently begun expanding with more company-owned shops.

As Tramontin tells it, Burgess persuaded them to make hers the first independently owned Kilwins. (There are now over 185 locations.) She says her mom sought out an attorney “and had a whole four-, five-page franchise agreement made up. Now, I can tell you, the current franchise agreement is thousands of pages.”

She was rebuffed by several potential landlords because, as Tramontin relates, “she was a woman, and they wanted a man to sign for her. And they kept saying, ‘Go talk to the Curtises. They’ll rent to anybody.’ She didn’t have any backing other than her word.” A branch of that family real estate business, A2 Curtis LLC, continued with them through the end, which will be December 31 (and perhaps into January for a few “extra-good deals” as they clear out). “I’m happy that we were able to stay here as long as we could,” Tramontin says.

The chocolatier enjoyed a nice symbiosis with the neighboring P.J.’s Flower Shop, whose space they would absorb in the mid-1990s as their offerings grew to include ice cream and fudge.

Tramontin helped out there in her youth, and her mother remarried, to the late jazz pianist Rick Burgess, owner of the popular Del Rio bar that closed in 2003 and co-owner of the Earle. Tramontin graduated from Community High and the now-defunct Wells College in upstate New York, then returned as a research assistant at U-M.

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“Ironically, I was doing cancer research in radiology when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999,” she says. Burgess considered selling her franchise, but instead her daughter joined her to partner in running the shop for another quarter century.

“Part of the success of the business, I truly believe, is that as owners, we were in store all the time,” Tramontin says, with “such an incredible, eclectic staff through the years.”

Her standout memories range from the fond to the freaky. One young couple, who had shared their first kiss at Kilwins, got engaged near the store’s threshold. And “a cute little Polish couple,” would stop in weekly for years to enjoy some hard candy. When they passed away in close succession, Kilwin’s supplied the chocolate trays for their joint memorial service.

On the stranger side, one time, while Tramontin was setting up window displays, “I was flashed by a flasher,” she says. “I can look back on it fondly and laugh about it now, but certainly when you’re eighteen, nineteen years old, I was mortified.”

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Over time, the parent company’s corporate culture became increasingly stifling: uniforms, standards guides, “constantly rebranding,” Tramontin says. In the wake of the pandemic, a decrease in foot traffic hurt sales, particularly around lunchtime. Higher costs and “aggressive homelessness downtown” are other factors she cites for declining to renew a ten-year franchise agreement. Private equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, which acquired Kilwins in 2023, may find a new Ann Arbor franchisee, but it’s unlikely to continue in the quaint, wood-fixtured location on E. Liberty.

Tramontin is eager for the freedom to devote herself to other pursuits, including her Blue Monk Studio yoga venue on the third floor of the former Del Rio building at W. Washington and S. Ashley, above Grizzly Peak Brewing Company. The family’s LLC for that building, Del Rio de Los Sueños, translates as “from the river of dreams,” an apt phrase for the retiring Burgess, who made her business dream abiding and sweet.

“She was definitely ahead of her time,” her daughter says.

Kilwins, 107 E. Liberty. (734) 769–7759. Through Dec. 31: Wed. noon–8 p.m., Thurs. 11 a.m.–8 p.m., Fri. & Sat. 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Sun. noon–8 p.m., closed Mon. & Tues. kilwins.com/pages/stores-near-me-ann-arbor-mi-48104-0009

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