What’s going to happen to JuJus?
Fans of Great Barrington’s JuJu’s unfussy and satisfying soft serve and crispy fried chicken were just getting their heads around yesterday’s Facebook announcement that the Lee restaurant was shutting its doors when owner Josh Irwin popped into social media feeds. He was going live from the road, filming from the back seat of the family pick-up truck to share a ‘bye for now’ video to his South Berkshire County fans, as well as an explanation for what was pulling them away from their bustling businesses.
The Irwins — Josh, wife Emily and ten-year-old son Jasper - had long been looking for both personal adventure and professional challenge, and they were there to say they’d landed on both, in Wilmington, North Carolina, where’s they’ve now arrived and are already getting to work starting up not one, but two new JuJus outlets. They hope to be open in time to take advantage of a fall festival on October 20th in the city.
The family’s Great Barrington footprint will remain, with a minor stake in The Well, Emily’s Home Love home goods store on Railroad Street, several residential apartments, and, of course, the flagship JuJu’s in the Triplex Cinema building. (The bar and lounge Mooncloud, which the Irwins co-own with Billy Paul, is for sale.)
As Irwin explained during a lunch break interview, it’s not as rash a move as it might appear from the outside, but rather one long in the making.
He explained that there are two types of businesses, lifestyle businesses and growth businesses. “Emily and I have had a decade now of running lifestyle businesses... Juju’s has been the thing that we wanted to turn into a growth business.”
Itching to see how far JuJu’s could go led him to Lee, and a deliberate attempt to test local scalability. But the business model — $6 ice cream cones and $12 chicken bites — runs on volume, and volume requires the kind of year-round foot traffic that Lee, for all its community loyalty, simply couldn't generate on a consistent basis.
There’s also the perennial problem of affordable housing. For years Irwin has been a vocal proponent of creative solutions, and it was his idea to turn the Windflower Inn into thirteen units of workforce housing. But the few such properties notwithstanding, the fact remains, as any retail, food, educational or healthcare establishment can attest, it’s nearly impossible to pay staff well enough to live here comfortably. (Irwin will remain on the board of Construct, where he’s served for many years.)
In the end it was clear that “unfortunately, it’s a lot harder to develop a growth business in the Berkshires than it is a lifestyle business.” The family started researching likely candidates for a JuJus expansion further afield and, once deciding on Wilington, had been flying back and forth to lay the groundwork for the move. When they got an offer on the perfect space, they had a hard question to answer: could they realistically keep all their Berkshire County balls in the air while also juggling two more elsewhere?
So, says Irwin, “as rough and abrupt as everything is — it all happened in like two weeks — it was like, we got to cut this line loose.”
Wilmington, NC versus South Berkshire County, MA
Wilmington, North Carolina is a college town of 150,000 people, compared to South Berkshire County’s 35,000. Those numbers get at one big problem Irwin laid out for business owners in this region. UNC Wilmington is a school of about 20,000 students, and lots of those young people settle down nearby after graduation.
Irwin says he’s met lots of them, with essentially the same story. “They say, ‘Oh yeah, I went to UNCW and I never left.’ That's not something that the Berkshires has in its cards — the ability to attract people and to maintain people, and for those people to afford to live there and have a good quality of life."
Today the median home value in Great Barrington in 2026 is $610,887 according to Zillow, with recent sales skewing into the $800 and $900,000 range, and a 3-bedroom apartment runs more than $3,000 per month in rent on average here. Rent for a 3-bedroom in Wilmington is $2,088 and the median home value is $417,975. The difference for a renter would be $13,200 per year between the two places. For a line cook or a general manager making $40,000 to $50,000 annually, it’s the difference between doable and undoable.
They’ll be back
This is not goodbye, says Irwin, as the family will be returning often. While his creativity in confronting the thorny problem of making downtown Great Barrington a welcoming place for energetic entrepreneurs will certainly be missed, he’s still got the bandwidth for some fresh GB brainstorming.
"What if,” he proposed from Wilmington, “we said we could pay your two years of rent and give you a $50,000 check towards starting your business? Would that help bring more unique things into town? Would having more unique things and awesome shops and restaurants and bars get people to come out and start spending more money, or do you need to have people spending more money before you can have those?"
It’s a chicken and egg sort of question that he might yet help to answer. In the meantime, local folks who want to keep tabs on the Irwins and their adventures will have to jump on a quick flight to check things out. Flying as a metaphor, in fact, came up several times.
Josh Irwin says he’s ready to, “put some wind underneath the wings of this thing that we’ve created…..I want to go up and up and up.”
Wilmington, he believes, is the place where JuJu's finally gets the wind it needs to climb.