By Mark Seavy 

Several retail brands are reopening stores after trips through bankruptcy, emerging with scaled-back locations under new ownership and featuring a narrower product mix. 

Bed Bath & Beyond (now Bed Bath & Beyond Home), The Container Store, and Big Lots all filed for bankruptcy protection and sold their brand assets to new owners. Now, they are all focused on discounting and will compete in some markets with the likes of Ross Stores, Burlington, and TJ Maxx.  

Whether these new stores will gain critical vendor support remains in question. In some cases, they are receiving inventory on a cash-on-delivery (COD) basis through factoring companies or on other tight terms, licensing industry executives said. 

Yet despite the challenges, 317-store Kirkland’s will open 15,000-square-foot Bed Bath stores in the Nashville, TN area along with the first Overstock location and a new BuyBuy Baby store. Overstock.com acquired the Bed Bath & Beyond brand following its filing for bankruptcy in 2023 and later changed its name to Beyond Inc. Kirkland’s forged a partnership with Beyond Inc. last fall.  

In the case of Bed Bath, it’s a smaller version for the retailer, which once operated more than 1,000 stores that averaged 30,000 square feet. These Bed Bath stores will carry a different product mix from Kirkland’s, with an expanded assortment of bed and bathroom products and fewer wall décor and lighting items, Kirkland’s CEO Amy Sullivan said. Overstock will be positioned as a “true off-price brand” that creates a “treasure hunt of deals” from Kirkland’s product assortment while also leaving room for vendors’ excess inventory, she said. 

“We are shifting priorities to deliver value to our customers through aggressive but capital-light store conversion strategy, leveraging Bed Bath & Beyond Home and Overstock,” said Sullivan, whose company received an additional $5 million from Beyond Inc. to expand its term loan. “This will allow us to maximize the current contribution of our [Kirkland’s]  existing home and furnishings inventory while taking advantage of the iconic Bed Bath & Beyond brand name.”  

Unlike years past, there seems to be synergy between the various retail brands that are seeking a return to relevancy.  

The Container Store, which emerged from bankruptcy in January as a private company under new owners Golub Capital, LCM Asset Management, and Glendon Capital Management, is carrying Bed Bath products in its 102 locations. The Container Store had 104 stores prior to its filing for bankruptcy in December. 

Variety Wholesalers, meanwhile, bought 219 Big Lots locations and started opening the first stores in early April. A discount retailer, Variety has added apparel and electronics to Big Lots, whose stores average 28,000-33,500 square feet (about the same size on average as Variety’s Roses Discount Stores). And Beyond Inc., which continues to operate the Bed Bath eCommerce business, has trimmed the number of SKUs available through the brand’s website to eight million (down from 12 million) but has added more furniture and patio products, CEO Marcus Lemonis said. 

“While we’re continuing to eliminate vendors that we don’t think fit our ethos or products that don’t meet our margin profile, we want to start getting into adding new categories and thinking about new things,” Lemonis said. “We look to acquire other valuable IP in the same family and home space so that we can then take those brands to our investment vehicle of Kirkland’s and see those brands come to life.”