Alright, so I want to start today by asking you
to do something. picture it for a second. I want
you to mentally open that one drawer in your
kitchen. We all have it. You know, the one. Oh,
yeah. The junk drawer. The junk drawer. Exactly.
The place where, you know, AA batteries go to
die and you've got rubber bands, takeout menus
from restaurants that closed three years ago.
All the unidentifiable keys. Exactly. The keys
to who knows what. I want you to dig through
that mental drawer for a second. Push aside the
dried out pens and tell me what you see at the
very, very bottom. It's big. It's glossy and
it is definitely blue. It is the oversized blue
20 percent off coupon. I mean, it might be the
single most recognizable piece of direct mail
in American history. Without a doubt. I don't
think anything else even comes close. For decades,
that coupon wasn't just a discount. It was practically
a secondary currency. It really was. It was a
cultural artifact. You didn't just go shopping
for home goods. You waited. You waited until
you had the big blue in your hand. It was a whole
ritual. It was a phenomenon. You know, in the
marketing world, we study that coupon. It's a
case study. It's one of the most effective tools
ever, ever created to drive foot traffic into
a store. It was brilliant. Until, of course,
it became the thing that helped kill the company.
And that is exactly where we are going today.
We are doing a deep dive into the retail giant
that just flooded our mailboxes for, what, 30
years? The company that seemed absolutely invincible.
The category killer that defined how an entire
generation set up their dorm rooms and their
first apartments. We are talking about Bed Bath
& Beyond. But this isn't just a, you know, a
nostalgia trip. Because today is Saturday, February
14th, 2026. And the story of Bed Bath & Beyond
has become... Well, it's become incredibly complicated.
It really has. It's a ghost story, it's a financial
thriller, and a zombie movie all rolled into
one. That's a perfect way to put it. I mean,
just think about the reality we're living in
right this second. If you drive to your local
strip mall in the U .S. today, the Bed Bath &
Beyond store, it's gone. It's been gone for years
now. It's been gone since 2023. Maybe it's a
gym now. Maybe it's a spirit Halloween that pops
up once a year. Or just a big, empty concrete
shell. Right. But if you go online, it's there.
If you go to Mexico, it's there. And this is
the part that just blows my mind. If you're listening
to us from Canada or the UK, you might actually
be seeing physical stores opening up again this
year. It is the brand that refuses to die. The
corporate body, you know, the actual company,
it completely disintegrated. But the spirit,
or at least the logo, it just keeps finding new
hosts to possess. So here is our mission for
this deep dive. We are going to unpack the entire
life cycle of this absolute beast of a company.
We're going to go all the way back to 1971. We
want to understand how two guys from a discount
chain basically reinvented retail. And we'll
look at the golden era. I mean, the period where
they just completely crushed the competition.
But then we have to look at the collapse. And
I don't mean just, oh, sales went down. We need
to get into the weeds of the financial engineering.
We have to talk about stock buybacks. We really
do. We need to explain something called death
spiral financing. It's as bad as it sounds. We
need to understand how a Fortune 500 company
can spend billions and billions of dollars on
itself and just end up with nothing. And then
finally, we're going to map out this completely
fractured afterlife. You know how Overstock .com
is now wearing the skin of Bed Bath & Beyond,
the tragedy of Bye Bye Baby, and this brand new
2026 revival plan that's happening as we speak.
So grab your shower caddy, grab your dorm room
bedding, and let's get into it. Let's do it.
Okay, so to really understand how massive this
thing got, we have to understand the world before
it existed. We're going back to 1971. A different
world. Completely. Nixon is in the White House.
Disney World just opened its doors in Florida.
And the way people shop for their homes was...
It was just totally different. Oh, completely.
I mean, think about it. In 1971, if you needed,
say, towels, sheets, or maybe a toaster, where
did you go? A department store. You went to a
department store. A Sears, a Macy's, maybe a
JCPenney. Or you went to some generic discount
store. And what was that experience like? I mean,
I'm imagining it was pretty limited. Limited
is the key word. The entire department store
model was based on curation. Some buyer at a
corporate headquarters in New York or Chicago
decided what was In style. So you'd walk into
the towel section and you'd have, what, maybe
three colors to choose from. Wait, beige? And
maybe a dusty blue or that avocado green that
was everywhere. Right, because the store manager's
thinking, okay, I've got to sell tires and clothes
and jewelry and lawnmowers. I can only give towels
one single aisle. Exactly. It was a general store
mentality. And into this world walk Warren Eisenberg
and Leonard Feinstein. The architects. The architects.
These two were retail veterans. They were working
as managers at a discount chain called Arlen's.
And they were smart guys. They saw the writing
on the wall for Arlen's. They could see it was
failing. They could. They realized that this...
Jack of all trades store was going to get squeezed
out of the market. They had this incredible insight
that the future wasn't in general stores, but
in specialty stores. Right. They basically thought,
what if we stopped trying to sell a little bit
of everything and instead we sold one thing,
but we sold more of it than anyone else on earth.
Focus. Extreme focus. So they leave Arlen's.
They go to Springfield, New Jersey, which, you
know, not exactly the retail capital of the world.
Apparently it was. Apparently so. And they open
a store. called, wait for it, Bed and Bath. Bed
and Bath. Very simple, very direct, no beyond
yet. Not yet. Just the basics. And for the first
decade or so, they're doing pretty well. By 1985,
they've got about 18 stores, mostly in the New
York metro area in California. But this is where
the pivotal moment happens. Because they weren't
the only ones who had this specialty idea. No,
you had this whole wave coming. A huge wave.
This was the era of what some people call the
linen wars. You had linens pillies. You had Pacific
linen, luxury linens. Suddenly, everybody wanted
to be the specialty home goods store. So Eisenberg
and Feinstein have to escalate. They have to
go nuclear. And in 1985, they opened their first
superstore. And this is really the birth of the
Bed, Bath & Beyond we all knew. This is the category
killer model. And we hear that term a lot, you
know, in business school, but let's really define
what that means. Yeah, break it down. A category
killer is a retailer that offers such an overwhelming,
just an absolutely staggering selection of a
specific category of merchandise. So many toasters
you can't even count them. Exactly. So many toasters
that it becomes impossible for a general store
to even try to compete. It's retail shock and
awe. It's shock and awe. That's a great way to
put it. It is. I mean, think about the psychology
of walking into one of those early super stores.
They didn't design it like some fancy, you know,
boutique. They designed it like a warehouse.
They called it the jungle. That's what they called
it internally. The jungle. And they stacked merchandise
from the floor literally to the ceiling. If you
were five foot two, you couldn't see over the
toast rile. You were just, you were walled in
by commerce. Which sounds kind of claustrophobic,
but it was actually brilliant, wasn't it? It
was incredibly effective because it triggered
a treasure hunt mentality in the shopper. This
is so crucial to their success. What do you mean
by that? Well, in a normal store, you go in,
you find the item you need, and you leave. It's
a chore. It's an errand. In Bed Bath & Beyond,
the layout was intentionally confusing. Wait,
on purpose? Oh, absolutely on purpose. They wanted
you to get lost. They created a layout where
you would go in looking for a pillow. But to
get to the pillows, you had to navigate past
a mountain of obscure kitchen gadgets you never
knew you needed. Right. And a tower of scented
candles and a whole wall of those, as seen on
TV products. And you're walking by thinking,
do I need a vibrating neck massager? I didn't
think I did five minutes ago, but now that I
see this wall of them. Exactly. It was engineered
to create impulse buys. You'd literally trick
over things you didn't know existed. Wow. Oh,
a strawberry huller. I guess I need that. A shower
radio. Right. Into the cart it goes. It turned
shopping from a chore into entertainment. And
to reflect this massive expansion, this idea
that it's so much more than just sheets and towels,
they changed the name. In 1987, Bed and Bath
becomes Bed, Bath, and Beyond. And that word
beyond. to a lot of heavy lifting. It basically
gave them permission to sell literally anything.
Anything. Food, electronics, health and beauty
products, furniture. I mean, if it could plausibly
fit inside a house, it was now beyond. And my
God, did it work. I mean, looking at the numbers
from the 90s, it's just a rocket ship. They go
public on the Nasdaq in June of 1992. And they
were tech savvy, too, which is something people
forget. In 1993, they adopted a computerized
integrated inventory management system. Which
sounds incredibly boring. Integrated inventory
management. But why does that actually matter?
It matters so much. Because in 1993, a lot of
retail was still basically pen and paper. Bed
Bath & Beyond, with this system, knew exactly
what color towel was selling and what zip code
on what day of the week. Wow. They could tailor
the inventory of every single store to the specific
neighborhood it was in. Their big rival, linens
and things, just couldn't do that as effectively.
So they were decentralized. The store managers
had some power. Highly decentralized. Store managers
had a ton of autonomy. If a manager in, say,
Miami saw that neon green sheets were flying
off the shelves for some reason. Right. They
could order more immediately without having to
ask corporate for permission. It made them incredibly
agile. And the growth just continues. By 1999,
they hit a billion dollars in sales. A billion.
They opened their 200th store that same year.
And if you fast forward to 2011, they had 1 ,142
stores. They were a Fortune 500 company. They
were in the Forbes Global 2000. They had won?
They had. effectively won the war, linens and
things, bankrupt in 2008, Pacific linen, gone.
Bed Bath & Beyond was the undisputed king of
the mountain. But you know what they say about
being on top of the mountain? It's a long way
down. It's a long way down, and it's very, very
easy to become complacent. And while the 90s
and 2000s were all about this explosive growth,
the seeds of the company's destruction were actually
being planted during this victory lap. Which
brings us to act two, the acquisition spree.
Because once they conquered the bedroom and the
bathroom, they decided they needed to own, well,
everything else in the house too. And this is
a classic corporate strategy problem, right?
Yeah. When you become ubiquitous, when there's
literally a Bed Bath & Beyond in every strip
mall that can possibly support one, you hit a
growth wall. You can't just keep opening more
stores. You can't. You start cannibalizing your
own sales. So the big question for the executives
becomes, how do you keep the stock price going
up? How do you show Wall Street you're still
growing? You buy other people. You buy growth.
Exactly. So let's just run through the shopping
list because it's eclectic. It is. 2002, they
buy Harman Discount Health and Beauty. Which
became Harman Face Values. You know, these were
small footprint stores, cheap shampoo, toothpaste.
It was actually a pretty decent business. Very
high volume. Then in 2003, they buy Christmas
Tree Shops. Now I have to pause here. If you
are from New England, you know Christmas Tree
Shops. It's an institution. If you aren't, the
name is completely baffling because they sold
way more than just Christmas trees. Oh, yeah.
It was a cult favorite in the Northeast and it
fit their treasure hunt vibe perfectly. You go
in for wrapping paper and come out with like
a lawn gnome and a giant bag of pretzels. Right.
Then in 2012, they make a much bigger move. They
dropped nearly half a billion dollars. $495 million
to buy Cost Plus World Market. That was a bigger
swing. World Market was all about unique imported
goods. You know, furniture, wine, weird snacks
from Germany. It was a clear attempt to get into
that kind of bohemian chic market. And then came
the digital buys trying to catch up online. One
Kings Lane in 2016 for luxury furniture. Decorist
in 2017 for online interior design. They were
just gobbling up brands left and right. But we
need to zoom in on one specific acquisition.
Or really, a pair of acquisitions. Because later
on, when the activists came for the company,
they pointed to these two deals and said this.
This is proof that the company is rotting from
the head down. You're talking about the nepotism
controversy. I am. Let's start with Bye Bye Baby.
It was acquired in 2007. And look, I Buy Baby
was a successful chain. It eventually became
the most valuable part of the whole company.
The jewel in the crown. No question. But who
founded it? It was founded by Richard and Jeffrey
Feinstein. And who are they? They are the sons
of the Bed Bath & Beyond co -founder Leonard
Feinstein. Right. So the company, a public company,
uses shareholder money to buy the co -founder's
son's company. The price was roughly $67 million,
plus they paid off its debt. Okay. That looks
cozy. It gets cozier. There was another smaller
acquisition, a company called Chef Central. What
do you think created that one? Let me guess.
It was the son of the other co -founder, Warren
Eisenberg. You see the pattern. Now, to be fair,
we have to say Bye Bye Baby was a legitimate,
successful business. It filled a huge void when
Babies R Us went under. It was profitable. But
from a corporate governance perspective, when
you are a public company using shareholder money
to acquire businesses owned by the founder's
own children. It just raises massive red flags.
It makes it look like a family fiefdom, not a
public corporation. Exactly. It sends a signal
to Wall Street that this isn't the meritocracy.
It's a family business that's just pretending
to be a modern corporation. And that kind of
vibe is fine when the stock is going up and up.
Nobody's asked questions when they're making
money. Nobody cares. But around 2015, 2016, the
music starts to slow down. And the whole retail
landscape had just shifted dramatically under
their feet. Amazon was becoming the everything
store. Wayfair was eating the furniture market
online. And suddenly that treasure hunt at Bed
Bath & Beyond started to feel less like an adventure.
And more like a hassle. It really did. The stores
were cluttered. The aisles were too tight to
get a cart through. And frankly, why would I
dig through a giant bin for a spatula when I
can press one button on my phone and have the
highest rated spatula in the world delivered
to my door tomorrow? The category killer was
getting killed by the ultimate category killer,
the internet. Which moves us right into act three,
the slow bleed. We're in 2019 now. The stock
has been sliding for years. The stores feel dated.
And the sharks start circling in the water. The
sharks in this particular story were a trio of
activist investment firms, Legion Partners, Masellum
Advisors, and Ancora Advisors. Activist investors.
Just to clarify, these are the guys who buy a
big chunk of a company's stock, not because they
love the company, but because they want to force
changes to make the stock pop, right? Precisely.
They want to get in, shake things up, make a
quick profit, and get out. And in March 2019,
they launched a full -on revolt. I remember this.
They released a presentation. It was like a slide
deck from hell that just tore the management
apart. Oh, it was brutal. They called out the
nepotism with the kids' companies. They called
out the declining profit margins. They pointed
out that the CEO, Stephen Tamaris, had been there
for 16 years and seemed to have absolutely no
plan for the digital age. And they won. They
did. It was a massive shakeup. A boardroom coup.
Tamaris stepped down. The board was completely
restructured. And in November... they brought
in the person they thought would be the savior.
Mark Triton. Mark Triton. He was the golden boy.
He came from Target, where he was the chief merchandising
officer, and everyone on Wall Street thought,
okay, this is it. He helped make Target cool
and successful. He's going to fix Bed, Bath &
Beyond. And his plan was very Target -esque.
On paper, it made a lot of sense. He wanted to
declutter the stores, you know, wider aisles,
cleaner sight lines, less stuff piled to the
ceiling. Made sense. And he wanted to lean heavily
into private labels' own brands that the company
creates itself, rather than just selling national
brands. So instead of selling a Cuisinart blender,
they'd sell a Bed Bath & Beyond brand blender.
Right. Because the profit margins are much, much
higher on your own stuff. But here is where he
completely miscalculated. Bed Bath & Beyond customers
were not Target customers. A totally different
shopper. Totally different. They came for the
brands. They came for the all -clad pans and
the Dyson vacuums. When you take away those trusted
brands and you replace them with a generic Studio
3B brand that nobody has ever heard of, people
get annoyed. And then came the cardinal sin,
the thing you mentioned at the very beginning,
killing the coupon. It was the strategy shift
heard around the world. Trayton and his new team.
wanted to reduce the company's reliance on those
blue coupons. His thinking was, we have trained
our customer to never, ever pay full price. We
have to break that addiction. Which, you know,
logically makes some sense. If you give everyone
20 % off on every purchase, you're just lighting
20 % of your revenue on fire. Economically, yes.
Psychologically. It was corporate suicide. That
coupon was the only reason a lot of people still
walked in the door. It was the dopamine hit.
It was the whole point of the trip. Yeah. When
you take that away and at the same time you replace
the brand names they love with generic knockoffs,
you are basically telling your most loyal customers
we don't want you anymore. And they listened.
They stopped coming. Sales just plummeted. But
the real killer. The thing that turned a struggling
company into a complete catastrophe. It wasn't
the coupons. It was the financial engineering
that was happening in the background. We have
to talk about the stock buybacks. Okay. We absolutely
have to stop the car here. We need to really,
really unpack this. Because in the research for
this deep dive, I saw a number that made my jaw
hit the floor. $11 .8 billion. That is the estimated
amount that Bed Bath & Beyond spent buying back
its own stock, starting in 2004 and going right
to the end. 11. Now, for the listener who isn't
a day trader, can you just explain this simply?
What is a stock buyback, and why would a company
spend its own cash to buy itself? Okay, let's
strip it all the way down. Imagine you and I,
we open a pizza shop. To raise money to buy the
big pizza oven, we sell 100 shares of stock to
our friends and family. So there are 100 shares
of our pizza company in existence. Okay, I own
one share, you own one, our friends own the rest.
Got it. Right. At the end of our first year,
our pizza shop makes $100 in profit. Simple math.
$100 of profit divided by 100 shares equals $1
of profit per share. That's your EPS, your earnings
per share. Wall Street is obsessed with EPS.
It's the scorecard. Got it. My share earned a
dollar. I'm happy. You're happy. But now imagine
next year we want our stock price to go up. But
we didn't sell any more pizza. We're a mature
business. We still only made $100. The business
is totally flat. How do we make the shares look
more valuable without actually working harder
or selling more pizza? We fledge the numbers.
No, that's jail. That's fraud. Instead, we do
something perfectly legal. We take the cash that's
sitting in our cash register, our savings, and
we go to our friends and we buy back 50 of their
shares. And we retire them. We basically shred
them. So now there are only 50 shares of our
pizza shop left in the entire world. Exactly.
But we still made our $100 in profit. So do the
math now. $100 of profit divided by 50 shares
is $2 per share. Bingo. The business didn't get
any better. We didn't sell a single extra slice
of pepperoni. But suddenly our earnings per share
magically doubled from $1 to $2. Wall Street's
algorithms see that growth and they bid up our
stock price. It's a magic trick. It is financial
engineering. And corporate executives love it
because their multi -million dollar bonuses are
often tied directly to hitting the share price
targets. But here's the massive catch. To buy
those shares back, we had to empty our cash register.
Right. We used up all the cash we might have
needed to, say, fix the oven when it breaks or
maybe build a delivery app. Or survive a global
pandemic. And that's what Bed Bath & Beyond did.
On an absolutely massive scale. They spent nearly
$12 billion on this. Just imagine for a second
if they had taken half of that, $6 billion, and
invested it in building a world -class e -commerce
and logistics network back in 2010. They could
have been a real competitor to Amazon. It could
have been. Instead, they basically set that cash
on fire to prop up the stock price for a few
more years. And then the rainy day came. And
the cash register was completely empty. This
led directly to the supply chain collapse that
we saw in 2022. I don't know if you went into
one of their stores then, but it was eerie. I
did. I remember walking in and my first thought
was, are they closing? The shelves were just
barren. They were taking like one towel and spreading
it out to fill three feet of. empty shelf space.
That's because they couldn't pay their vendors.
Yeah. It's that simple. If you don't pay KitchenAid,
KitchenAid stops sending you stand mixers. No
cash means no inventory. No inventory means no
sales. No sales means no cash. It's a death spiral.
Which brings us to act four, the collapse. The
years 2022 and 2023. This is where the story
goes from struggling retailer to just absolute
utter chaos. And we enter the meme stock era.
Bed Bath & Beyond became one of those stocks,
just like GameStop or AMC, that online traders
on Reddit forums became obsessed with. They wanted
to stick it to the big hedge funds who were betting
against the company. And the central character
in this part of the story is Ryan Cohen. The
founder of Chewy .com, a billionaire activist
investor and a hero to the meme stock crowd.
In March of 2022, Cohen buys a huge stake in
the company, almost 10%. He sends a blistering
letter to the board, and he basically says, your
strategy is a total failure. You need to sell
off Buy Baby immediately because it's the only
thing of value you have left. And because he's
Ryan Cohen, the retail investors on Reddit go
wild. The stock just shoots to the moon. He gets
three seats on the board. And for a brief moment,
it looked like maybe, just maybe, he was going
to turn it around. But then July 2022, Mark Trenton,
the CEO, is fired. Sue Gove takes over. And then
August happens. August of 2022. The stock pumps
massively again on pure speculation. And right
at the very peak, Ryan Cohen sells. Everything.
He dumps his entire stake in the company. You
walked away with a profit of something like $60
million, right? In just a few months. Roughly,
yes. And the stock crashed immediately. The retail
investors, the regular people who had followed
him into the trade, who believed in him, they
were left holding the bag. It was a classic rug
pull. And amidst all this financial chaos, there
was a terrible human tragedy. In September 2022,
the company's CFO, Gustavo Arnal, It was a shocking,
just a heartbreaking event. He had recently been
named in a class action lawsuit that alleged
a pump and dump scheme regarding the stock alongside
Ryan Cohen. And, you know, we have to be careful
not to speculate on his personal state of mind,
but it highlighted the immense crushing pressure
that was happening behind the scenes. The walls
were just closing in from every single side.
It really cast a very dark shadow over the company's
final months. And operationally, the company
was in a complete freefall. In January 2023,
they issued a going concern warning. And that's
basically corporate speak for we don't think
we're going to make it. The stock plunged 30
percent on that news alone. Analysts were predicting
bankruptcy within days. But then we saw one of
the most bizarre financial maneuvers in recent
retail history. The death spiral financing. It
sounds like a wrestling move. He's got him in
the death spiral or like a heavy metal band.
It is definitely not something you want to be
involved with financially. So explain this to
me. They needed cash desperately. They made a
deal with a hedge fund called Hudson Bay Capital.
How did this work? Because it sounds incredibly
complex. It is complex, but let's try to simplify
it. Bed Bath & Beyond needed money right now
just to pay vendors and keep the lights on. Hudson
Bay said we'll give you up to $1 billion. Okay,
that sounds good. A lifeline. But, Hudson Bay
said, in exchange, you don't give us cash back.
You give us something called convertible preferred
stock. And the key feature of this stock is that
we can convert it into regular shares of your
company at a discount to whatever the current
trading price is. Wait, whatever the current
price is? That sounds really dangerous. It's
lethal. Yeah. So let's say the stock is trading
at $5 a share. Hudson Bay converts some of their
debt into stock, but they get it at a discount.
say for $4, they immediately sell that stock
on the open market for $5. And they make an instant
risk -free profit of $1 per share. Exactly. Nice
deal for them. But what happens to the stock
price when they dump all those newly created
shares on the market to get their profit? Supply
and demand. When you flood the market with sell
orders, the price drops. So the stock goes from
$5 down to $3. Right. But Hudson Bay still has
more debt to convert. And remember, the deal
says they get a discount on whatever the current
price is. So now they convert their next batch
at, say, $2 .50. And they sell it at $3. Which
drives the price down even further to maybe $2.
Then they convert at $1 .50, sell at $2, drive
it down to $1. It's a loop. It just feeds on
itself. It is the spiral. The more they convert
and sell... the lower the price goes. And the
lower the price goes, the more shares Bed Bath
& Beyond has to print to pay back the same amount
of money. It just dilutes all the existing shareholders
down to basically zero. Completely. It was a
Hail Mary that delayed the inevitable by a few
months, but it absolutely destroyed the equity.
The deal actually fell apart in March because
the stock price got so low that the math just
stopped working. And that was it. Game over.
April 23rd, 2023. Bed Bath & Beyond officially
files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And it's important
to note this wasn't a reorganization bankruptcy
where they planned to fix the debt and stay open.
This was a liquidation. They were parting out
the car for scraps. April 26th, 2023. The day
the coupons died, they announced they would no
longer accept them. I remember reading reports
of people just rushing to the stores with these
huge stacks of blue coupons, desperate to buy
anything they could before they became worthless.
It was truly the end of an era. And other retailers,
I remember the Container Store, Big Lots, Boscobs,
they briefly said, hey, bring us your useless
bed bath coupons. We'll honor them. Which is
a brilliant marketing move. Just genius. Come
to us. We'll take care of you. And then came
the long goodbye. The liquidation sales. The
giant everything must go signs. And the last
brick and mortar Bed Bath & Beyond store in the
United States closed its doors for good on July
30th, 2023. And that really should have been
the end of the story. 1971 to 2023. R .I .P.
A retail giant is dead. But it wasn't. And this
is where we get to Act 5. The strange, strange
afterlife. Because here we are recording this
in 2026 and the name Bed Bath & Beyond is still
everywhere. It's like a ghost that found a new
body to possess. It's the zombie brand phenomenon.
In June of 2023, during the bankruptcy auction,
the online retailer Overstock .com swooped in.
Overstock. Another one of the dot -com era survivors.
Right. And it bought the intellectual property.
So the name, the customer data, the website domains
for $21 .5 million. Which is a... Deal, honestly.
$21 .5 million for a brand name that almost every
single American knows. That's pennies. It was
an absolute bargain. And Overstock did something
really radical. They didn't just run Bed Bath
& Beyond as like a little side project. They
realized their own name, Overstock, was kind
of a problem. It sounds cheap. It sounds like
a clearance bin. It sounds like leftovers. So
they made a bold move. They ditched it. They
rebranded their entire company. Overstock .com
became Bed Bath & Beyond Online. They just took
the name and slapped it right onto their website.
So if you go to BedBathAndBeyond .com right now
in the United States, you are technically shopping
at what used to be Overstock. Precisely. And
the original corporate entity, the one that actually
went bankrupt, it had to change its name to something
incredibly robotic just so it could dissolve
and die in court. It's now called 202030930 -DKButterfly1,
Inc. DKButterfly. That sounds like a bad sci
-fi movie. It really does. Now, what about Bye
Bye Baby? You mentioned it was the jewel in the
crown. That was a much sadder story, unfortunately.
It was sold off separately to a company called
Dream On Me, which is a New Jersey -based...
baby furniture manufacturer. They paid about
$15 .5 million for it. And they had big ambitions,
didn't they? They wanted to reopen like 120 stores.
They really tried to stage this massive comeback.
He did, but it just didn't stick. No. Running
physical retail is incredibly hard. And by the
end of 2024, all of those reopened buy -baby
stores had closed down again. They had to pivot
to being purely an online operation. It just
goes to show you that buying a beloved brand
name doesn't guarantee you can actually run the
physical stores profitably. But speaking of physical
stores, let's look north of the border because
the Canadian saga is a roller coaster that is
still going on right now as we speak. It really
is. So the Canadian arm of Bed Bath & Beyond
liquidated in April 2023 right alongside the
U .S. stores. But then a guy named Doug Putman
enters the chat. The Canadian billionaire who
owns Toys R .S. Canada. He loves a distressed
retail asset. He bought 21 of the old Bed Bath
& Beyond leases, and he launched a brand new
chain called Rooms Plus Spaces. He tried to fill
that void in the market. I remember seeing the
signs for that. It looked a lot like Bed Bath
& Beyond, just with a different logo. But it
failed. And it failed quickly. By January 2025,
which is just over a year ago from where we sit
now, all the rooms plus spaces locations were
closed. It seemed like the physical big box home
goods model was truly dead in Canada. However,
and this is the news that has us talking in 2026,
there is another revival happening right now.
Yes. In the summer of 2025, Sleep Country Canada,
the mattress giant, they purchased the rights
to the Bed Bath & Beyond name in Canada and in
the UK. And their plan, which they're executing
as we speak, is to bring physical Bed Bath &
Beyond stores back again. Okay, so let me just
get this straight because it's confusing. If
I'm in New York, Bed Bath & Beyond is a website
run by the company that used to be Overstock.
Correct. If I'm in Toronto, Bed Bath & Beyond
is about to be a physical store run by the mattress
company, Sleep Country. Also correct. And if
I'm in Mexico. It's still the original Bed Bath
& Beyond Mexico. It was a joint venture, so it
remained legally independent and never went bankrupt.
It's just trucking along down there like nothing
ever happened. It is a multiverse of retail madness.
It really challenges our definition of what a
company actually is. Is it the people? Is it
the buildings? The supply chain? Or is it just
the logo and the font? That's the big question,
isn't it? And it brings us to our takeaways.
When we look back at this whole 50 -year saga
from the very first bed and bath in 1971 to these
fragmented zombie brands of 2026, what are the
big lessons here? I think there are three critical
lessons. The first, and maybe the biggest, is
the danger of short -term thinking. specifically
those stock buybacks. They spent $11 .8 billion
buying their own stock to freeze Wall Street
today. And they completely starved the business
of the innovation and investment it needed for
tomorrow. They ate their own seed corn. It's
the perfect definition of it. The second lesson
is the failure to adapt to e -commerce. They
were just too late. They let Amazon get a 10
-year head start. And when they finally did try
to buy things like One King's Lane, it was too
little too late. They treated the internet as
a side project. Not the main event. And the third
lesson. I think it's the loss of the experience.
You mentioned the treasure hunt earlier. In the
early days, you went to Bed Bath & Beyond because
it was fun. You found things you didn't even
know you needed. Yeah. By the end, it was a chore.
The stores were messy. They were out of stock.
And frankly, they were depressing. When you lose
that emotional connection with your customer,
when you become just another place to buy a towel,
you're dead. Because I can buy a towel anywhere.
And that leads me to... this reflection on brand
equity because despite all of that failure despite
the messy stores the bankruptcy the empty shelves
the name bed bath and beyond was still worth
millions and millions of dollars to overstock
and to sleep country and that is the incredible
power of nostalgia and habit that name has 50
years of prime real estate in our brains it just
means home Even if the business model completely
failed, the label itself still carries a certain
amount of trust. It's a shortcut for the consumer.
Oh, Bed Bath & Beyond, I know them. They sell
home stuff. I get it. Building that kind of recognition
from scratch takes decades and a fortune. Buying
it for $21 million is a massive shortcut. So
here's my final provocative thought for you,
the listener, to chew on. We now live in a world
where Bed, Bath & Beyond exists as two, maybe
even three, completely different realities, depending
entirely on your GPS coordinates. It makes you
wonder, is a brand a promise of a specific experience,
or is it just a sticker we slap on inventory
to make it sell? And if the sticker is all that
really matters, does it even matter who is running
the warehouse behind it? Something to think about
the next time you're digging through your junk
drawer looking for a 20 % off coupon that doesn't
exist anymore. Thanks for diving deep with us.
See you next time.