Daily News
From Home Furnishing Business
Over’stocks’ Are Breathing New Life with Bed Bath & Beyond
July 4,
2023 by HFBusiness Staff in Business Strategy, Industry 
In an article in the Wall Street Journal, the growth of Overstock.com questions the worth of their strategy going forward of operating solely as Bed Bath & Beyond and along with it, changing the way they do business.
The article notes, “Say goodbye to the old Overstock.com and hello to the rebirth of Bed Bath & Beyond dot-com. Or so it seems.”
The statistics speak for how the market perceives the shift; shares of Overstock are up 65% since reports emerged on June 5 that the company was bidding on Bed Bath & Beyond’s intellectual property.
As reported earlier, Overstock.com won the bid on June 22 and closed on the acquisition last week. By August, Overstock.com plans to launch their “new” domain and identity as Bed Bath and Beyond in the U.S. They are already live in Canada.
The Wall Street Journal article suggests caution when looking at the valuation for a number of reasons. The “other home-focused retailers—ranging from Crate & Barrel, HomeGoods and Williams-Sonoma—have been aggressively courting former Bed Bath & Beyond shoppers, as Matuszewski noted in a report. And competition among them is likely only going to get fiercer.”
“(Also), breathing new life into bankrupt but well-known brands is easier said than done. Retail Ecommerce Ventures, a company that bought brands such as Pier 1 Imports, Modell’s Sporting Goods and Stein Mart and operated them as online-only businesses, itself has been facing financial struggles and hired restructuring lawyers earlier this year,” as The Wall Street Journal reported.
The moral of the story is that Overstock has a strategy, but it has not been proven yet; and for a company with a history of unpredictable businesses under former leadership, it may be “too early to get comfortable with Overstock… especially at these elevated prices.”