WEST LEBANON — Preppies will finally have a reason to come to West Lebanon.

The collegiate-conscious clothing store chain J.Crew plans to open an outlet store in the Upper Valley Plaza on Route 12A in West Lebanon, a rare new commercial tenant at a shopping center where some of the storefronts have remained vacant for years.

Upper Valley Plaza owner WS Development has submitted a building permit application to the city’s planning department for an $850,000 project to convert the space currently occupied by women’s apparel store Maurices into a 5,000-square-foot J.Crew Factory store.

Maurices, which opened in Upper Valley Plaza in 2003, is slated to close on Jan. 23 after more than 20 years in business.

“As part of our standard fleet review, we continually evaluate locations to optimize our business,” Kristin McClement, vice president of brand and growth of Duluth, Minn.-based Maurices said via email.

A spokeswoman for J.Crew Factory said the Upper Valley store is targeted to open sometime this summer.

J.Crew Factory is the discount arm of fashion retailer J.Crew Group and has been expanding its retail store chain — now at 237 stores nationwide — following J.Crew Group emerging from bankruptcy in 2020. The outlets carry apparel designed in the style of the J.Crew brand but at lower prices than at the signature J.Crew stores.

It is not clear if the opening of the Factory store will have any impact on the J.Crew store in Hanover, which opened in 2012 and was earmarked for closure during the company’s 2020 bankruptcy at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. J.Crew and landlord Dartmouth College subsequently were able to reach agreement and the Hanover store was taken off the company’s “reject” list.

Dartmouth spokesperson Diana Lawrence said the real estate office has not received any information about a change in status of the Hanover store.

J.Crew Factory officials did not reply to emailed questions about the future status of the Hanover J.Crew store, which was opened in 2012 when former J.Crew CEO Mickey Drexler’s daughter, a member of the class of 2014, was a student at Dartmouth.

A spokesperson for WS Development, the plaza owner, said the company could not comment about J.Crew Factory but “we look forward to providing updates about Upper Valley Plaza when there is news to share.”

Upper Valley Plaza has been without an anchor tenant since JCPenney — occupying 64,000 square feet — closed in 2020. The space formerly occupied by Sears has been vacant — except for seasonal pop-up stores — since the store closed in 2017, and the space formerly occupied by Olympia Sports has been vacant since 2022.

Securing new tenants, especially given the challenges for brick-and-mortar retail stores because of the shift to online shopping, can take years.

Party City in Upper Valley Plaza closed in 2019, and it was not able to get a new tenant until Barnes and Noble opened a bookstore in the space last July.

Barnes and Noble opening up a new bookstore was a return of sorts for the national bookstore chain to the Upper Valley.

The college division of Barnes and Noble had previously operated the former Dartmouth Bookstore on Main Street in Hanover until closing it in 2018.

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.