Bed Bath & Beyond — the home goods retailer that filed for bankruptcy in April — relaunched Tuesday as an online-only shop, taking over the digital space that once belonged to Overstock.com.
The Overstock.com domain now redirects to BedBathandBeyond.com. On that site, Bed Bath will return to selling bathroom, bedroom and kitchen-related products, company officials said. The online store gives customers a larger array of home furnishings products and fixes some core issues that were afflicting both Overstock and Bed Bath, said Overstock CEO Jonathan Johnson.
“Overstock has a great business model with a name that does not reflect its focus on home,” he said in a statement. “Bed Bath & Beyond is a much-loved and well-known consumer brand, which had an outdated business model that needed modernizing.”
Overstock bought Bed Bath & Beyond in June for $21.5 million during a bankruptcy court supervised auction. Overstock’s purchase didn’t include Bed Bath’s remaining brick-and-mortar stores, which closed earlier this summer — a development Johnson has said he welcomes.
The revived Bed Bath & Beyond also said it has reinstated points shoppers had earned under the company’s former loyalty program and refreshed the store’s mobile app.
Bed Bath was one of many victims of a wave of retail bankruptcies in recent years as the economy tightened and Americans became less willing to spend — in-store or otherwise. Cineworld Group (the parent company of Regal Cinema), Party City and Vice Media are just a handful of brands on a longer list of Chapter 11 filings so far this year. Tuesday Morning and Revlon went bankrupt last year.
Bed Bath & Beyond opened as a privately held business in 1971 and went public in 1992. As the U.S. economy boomed, the company had a 15-year run of earnings that met or beat Wall Street expectations. But its momentum slowed with the explosion of online shopping. Before filing for bankruptcy, Bed Bath and its children’s focused store, Buy Buy Baby, had experienced years of declining sales.
With a website name change, the Overstock brand will quietly dissolve over time, company officials said.
Johnson told the Associated Press that the name change was necessary because Overstock still confuses some customers and suppliers who believe it is a liquidator, which is how the company got its start in 1999. It transformed in 2004 into a general merchandise retailer, selling a wide variety of items. In 2021, Overstock fine-tuned its strategy to focus on furniture and home decor, getting rid of items like clothing and jewelry.
Bed Bath’s relaunch comes nearly a month after the company made a similar move in Canada. Johnson told the AP that the Canadian relaunch has “run without a hitch” and that the company has added roughly 600,000 bed and bath items since last month.
— The Associated Press contributed to this report.