Beyond Inc. — owner of the Bed Bath & Beyond, BuyBuy Baby and Overstock brands — sees itself as a digital-first company, but that doesn’t mean it’s ruled out the idea of physical stores. In fact, during the company’s Q1 earnings call with analysts, the company’s Executive Chairman and Principal Executive Officer Marcus Lemonis announced plans to open four Overstock stores and one BuyBuy Baby location. These are in addition to the previously announced Bed Bath & Beyond stores already in the works via Beyond’s investment partnership with fellow home goods retailer Kirkland’s.
A BuyBuy Baby Test Store and a Brick-and-Mortar Debut for Overstock
Beyond acquired BuyBuy Baby earlier this year, after the brand had shifted to a digital-only format and closed its remaining 11 stores in late 2024. Lemonis said he felt that BuyBuy Baby “needed to be part of this company at all costs,” given that fact that it and Bed Bath & Beyond are “known synonymously by consumers.” Now, Lemonis said Beyond is exploring ways to bring BuyBuy Baby’s store footprint “back to life,” beginning with one store that will likely be in Nashville.
Beyond already had announced plans to bring Bed Bath & Beyond back to brick-and-mortar through its partnership with Kirkland’s, under which Kirkland’s will operate a series of small-format “neighborhood” stores called Bed Bath Home. Lemonis said on the call that the Bed Bath Home concept was launching in a “very, very low CapEx way,” [i.e. with little capital expenditure] adding that the stores will look “a lot like Kirkland’s and incorporate a lot of the products that Bed Bath & Beyond is selling today successfully online — small furniture pieces, a little bit more textiles, a little bit more décor.
“Beyond is not prepared today to open a bunch of stores,” Lemonis added. “We want our dollars to be spent on technology, investing in the customer experience, figuring out how to exploit and get more out of our blockchain assets and looking to acquire other valuable IP in the same family and home space, so that we can then take those brands to our investment vehicle of Kirkland’s and see those brands come to life.”
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But while stores will not be a major investment area for the company, they are part of the playbook — including, somewhat surprisingly, Overstock.com, which has never operated storefronts before. Lemonis shared that four Overstock stores are currently in the works and will be strategically placed geographically so that they can act as fulfillment and returns venues for the online business.
The larger aim behind all of these moves is to improve the Overstock’s overall financial performance, particularly in the areas of margin and returns: “Selling online is a very complicated business and few do it very well,” said Lemonis. “We want to be one of those few, but we also know that we have to lower our cost of marketing, we have to increase the size of our retained database, and we have to figure out how to build basket size over time.”
BuyBuy Baby Digital Token Arriving May 8
Earlier this month, Beyond made an unusual move to drive awareness of and engagement with the Overstock brand by launching a digital token that will give investors the chance to own a piece of the Overstock intellectual property. On the call, Lemonis shared that a similar offering would be launched for the BuyBuy Baby IP on May 8.
Lemonis first hinted at this strategy when Beyond bought BuyBuy Baby, floating the ideas of “tokenizing” part of the BuyBuy Baby IP (as it has now done with Overstock), as well as potentially creating a blockchain-based ledger that would act as a centralized database for all of a family’s important documents.
“The idea behind the [Overstock] token wasn’t to raise a hundred million dollars; we didn’t need to raise capital,” said Lemonis on the call. “The idea behind the token was to prove out that the platform works, understand that it can happen in a very short period of time [and] understand what about the system doesn’t work.
“On May 8, we’ll be issuing the BuyBuy Baby token — different strategy, different audience, trying to find new ways to see if we can make that work,” Lemonis added. “After that, people should expect our company to look at every asset we own, whether it’s a direct ownership or an indirect ownership, and look to continue to prove out the value of that tZERO platform [where the Overstock token is being sold and of which Beyond is an investor], because I believe it’s worth something; I believe it’s worth a lot. The only way to [prove that] is to put your money where your mouth is. We’re going to look at every different way to show people all the different types of things that you could do on that platform while becoming the biggest cheerleader to find other companies not related to us to do the same thing.”
Beyond Puts Rosy Spin on Lackluster Earnings
Despite less than stellar results in Q1, Lemonis presented a positive picture of the business, saying “we really feel like the first quarter was the first quarter of a brand-new business. As we move into 2025, we feel like we have restructured and rebuilt and reimagined an entirely new company.”
This, in the context of a 39.4% year-over-year decline in net revenue and a net loss of $40 million. However, “we believe that we are 60 days away from transitioning from a restructuring company to a growth company,” said Lemonis. “That doesn’t mean that we think we’re going to make a bunch of money in 60 days. What that means is that we feel that 60 days from today, to be very specific, we will have done what we needed to do with our SKU count, with new technology being implemented, new platforms being initiated, new layers being laid on top of on the technology side that make us more efficient. We want to move away from cutting, cutting, cutting. You don’t cut your way to a profit. You sell your way to a profit.”
Only Q2 will tell.
