5 Green Boxes is going home.

At the end of June, the bohemian gift shop in Denver’s Platt Park neighborhood will move back to its original space, 1705 S. Pearl St.

Luckily for owner Charlotte Elich, she won’t have to haul her inventory too far. 5 Green Boxes’ new spot is about a block and a half from its current one at 1570 S. Pearl, where Elich has been slinging eclectic furniture, decor and the like since 2009.

“We’ve hit the heart of a lot of people who love this place,” said Elich, who opened the store in 2000. “I don’t want us to go anywhere else.”

Elich said an impending rent increase at her current 2,000-square-foot space forced the decision. A new owner purchased the property in September for $1.3 million, records show.

She also considered buying, but being in her early 70s, the timing wasn’t ideal.

“The property went up for sale for a lot of money, and I just didn’t want to get another mortgage,” she said.

Elich has owned the 9,000-square-foot building that will soon house her “big store” for 40 years. In 1977, she opened her first brick and mortar, a yarn store, at the corner of South Pearl and Mexico.

5 Green Boxes will go into a unit on the first floor of the building, which is also home to a yoga studio, meditation center and beauty salon. She said a boutique “little store” under the same name, which neighbors the soon-to-be-vacant unit at 1596 S. Pearl, will stay selling women’s apparel up the road.

“It won’t be the same format as it is now,” she said of the new spot, which is 1,200 square feet. “But I have a beautiful garden out back that people can come here and sit and enjoy their day.”

Elich is a South Pearl lifer, spearheading many of the street’s staple events like farmers markets, winter fest and a festival celebrating artisans worldwide called Global Love Fest. Before opening the yarn store, she worked at a mechanic’s shop on the street for several years.

But since the pandemic, business has been difficult, she said. Between an increasingly online retail landscape and ballooning overhead, 5 Green Boxes’ sales and margins have dwindled.

“What’s killing us is COVID — that’s when it started getting really hard,” Elich said. “Buying habits have changed, there was not as much mail order like Amazon (before). That’s really changed the face of brick and mortar.

“I remember hiring people for $7 an hour, and now it’s $19 an hour,” she continued. “While that’s great, it’s hard to do that as a retail store with all that changing on you.”

5 Green Boxes’ outpost at Union Station, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, has cut hours and staffing coming out of COVID. Elich used to have five employees and be open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and then a few hours later Friday and Saturday.

But for the past few years, the number has vacillated between two or three staff. The extra weekend hours have been nixed.

“We know that there’s less sales in Union Station and downtown in general,” she said. “You don’t have office workers anymore, or people just don’t feel safe going down there.”

To try to mitigate some of the issues, she’s held pop-ups and other specialty events at 5 Green Boxes’ warehouse in Lincoln Park, which records show Elich bought for $950,000 in 2017.

But even those are being threatened. She said that several weeks ago, she was approached by someone from Denver wanting to acquire the property through eminent domain. It sits on the east side of Interstate 25, where she said apartment buildings have been popping up in recent years.

Elich said the initial offer was low, so she is getting an appraisal to try to recoup market value

“There’s definitely a change. The universe is saying something to me, and that’s OK. I’ve done this for a long time,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of adventures and been different places and bought a crapload of stuff that people love and enjoy and inspires them. We’re different somehow than other retailers.”