Signage is displayed outside a permanently closed Bed Bath & Beyond retail store in Hawthorne, California, on May 1, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Bed Bath & Beyond is back — kind of.
The bankrupt home goods chain is being resurrected by the owners and licensees of its intellectual property, which opened the first new Bed Bath & Beyond store in Nashville, Tennessee, on Friday with potentially dozens of more to come.
This time around, the store has a new name — Bed Bath & Beyond Home — and marks a “fresh start” for the beloved brand, said Amy Sullivan, the CEO of The Brand House Collective, the store’s operator.
“We’re proud to reintroduce one of retail’s most iconic names with the launch of Bed Bath & Beyond Home, beautifully reimagined for how families gather at home today,” Sullivan said in a news release. “With Bed Bath & Beyond Home we’re delivering on our mission to offer great brands, for any budget, in every room. It’s a powerful addition to our portfolio and a meaningful step forward in our transformation.”
In honor of the brand’s legacy, the new store will accept the brand’s famous 20% coupon, regardless of when it expired.
“We encourage guests to bring in their legacy Bed Bath & Beyond coupons which we will gladly honor,” the company said in a news release. “The coupon we all know and love is back and for those who need one, a fresh version will be waiting at the door.”
Bed Bath and Beyond 2.0 has been several years in the making and involved a rigmarole of corporate acquisitions and rebrandings. When the original Bed Bath and Beyond filed for bankruptcy in April 2023 following a string of corporate missteps, it struggled to find a buyer and ended up liquidating and selling off its business in parts. Overstock.com later bought the brand’s intellectual property, rebranded its business to Beyond Inc. and launched an online-only version of Bed Bath and Beyond.
What followed from there was a dizzying array of corporate deal-making. Ultimately, Beyond took an ownership stake in Kirkland’s Inc., a home decor chain with around 300 stores across the U.S., and gave it the exclusive license to develop and create Bed Bath & Beyond Home stores, as well as Buy Buy Baby stores.
Kirkland’s later rebranded to The Brand House Collective and plans to convert some of its existing Kirkland’s Home stores into more Bed Bath and Beyond shops. Friday’s launch in Nashville is the first of six planned for the market and, pending the results, it plans to convert around 75 additional stores through 2026.
The company said it chose Nashville for the launch because of its proximity to its corporate headquarters, which will allow it to “closely manage every detail and set the standard for future rollouts.”
While the relaunch is exciting for fans of the legacy brand, it comes at a difficult time for the home decor market. In many ways, Bed Bath & Beyond’s bankruptcy was the fault of its management team and execution missteps, but it also faced macro challenges as well, experts said at the time. Competition from players like Amazon, Walmart, Home Goods and Wayfair has made it harder for other brands to capture customer spend, and the overall sector has been soft for several years because of high interest rates and the sluggish housing market.
Even the current leaders in the home decor space have seen soft trends and it’s unlikely that will change until interest rates fall and the housing market picks back up, some analysts have said.
