Ultimately, that was "a misread of what demand was for their products," Basham said.Watch Video: AP Top Stories April 23 P.M.īed Bath & Beyond filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday, following years of sales and failed turnaround attempts. Bed Bath & Beyond announced last August it would discontinue three of its private labels - Haven, Studio 3B and Wild Sage. Under Tritton, store managers began stocking shelves with products from at least 10 company-owned brands.īut the experiment failed because the products were low quality, exacerbated by a lackluster marketing push, Basham said. Several years ago, Bed Bath & Beyond sought to emulate Target's success selling private-label products, Thomas said.
"They weren't positioned as strongly as other online retailers." Private-label fail "When they went to shop online, Bed Bath & Beyond wasn't really the first thought in terms of most customers," he said. By 20, consumers were relying more on companies like Amazon, Target, Walmart and Wayfair for home goods, Lindsey said.Īnd once the pandemic hit, customers started thinking about ways to spruce up their home office. Notably, that came at perhaps the worst possible time - the two years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic. Many scaled back their business with Bed Bath & Beyond, leading to fewer products on shelves and unhappy customers. The large stock buyback sent an unsettling message to suppliers who ship merchandise to stores, with vendors fearing the company wouldn't have enough cash on hand to pay them, Basham said. Under Tritton's direction, Bed Bath & Beyond in 2021 also spent $625 million buying back shares in a move that later proved costly, Basham said. He redesigned the look of stores while shrinking the amount of merchandise on shelves. Key financial misstepĮxperts said Tritton's tenure at Bed Bath & Beyond was marked by two noteworthy moves. "They kept with the brick-and-mortar model and didn't introduce a website quickly enough," he said.
But by then the company was nearly a decade behind leaders in the field, Basham said. "So it was too late to catch up quickly when retail started going online."īed Bath & Beyond finally hopped on the e-tailing bandwagon after naming Mark Tritton, a former top Target executive, CEO in 2019. "He thought that was all they needed to do and he wasn't willing to adjust," Basham said of Temares. Once products started arriving on their doorstep promptly and it became easier to return items purchased online, customers were sold, added Lindsey, an expert on consumer behavior.ĭuring its heyday, Bed Bath & Beyond was led by former CEO Steven Temares, who Wedbush analyst Seth Basham described as an "old-school retail merchant" whose business model came down to "stack it high and let it fly." By the early 2000s it had opened hundreds of stores across the U.S., including many large-footprint outlets that required a constant flow of customers and that characterized how many Americans preferred to shop at the time.
E-commerce was already taking off by the early 2000s, and consumers embraced online shopping for home goods starting around 2010, said University at Buffalo professor Charles Lindsey. But momentum slowed once online shopping hit its stride.
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