Bed Bath & Beyond Lives On
Overstock.com will use Bed Bath & Beyond as the new name for its online presence.
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Bed Bath & Beyond was supposed to go away. It went bankrupt because of poor management and a lack of cash. Its employees were fired, along with management. Its stores were shut down, which hurt some property owners. However, Overstock.com Inc. (NASDAQ: OSTK) bought Bed Bath & Beyond’s domains and website, among other things, for a tiny $21.5 million. Wall Street loved the deal and sent the price of Overstock.com higher. One reason is that Overstock.com will use Bed Bath & Beyond as the new name for its online presence. (These companies have the worst reputations.)
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The deal shows that brands can live on after the businesses that own them go away. The same happened with RadioShack and, for a while, book retailer Borders. This also happened briefly for Blockbuster.
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Another advantage Overstock.com has is that it will operate Bed Bath & Beyond without the encumbrance of people, store rent or a large investment in marketing. It also gives up on bumbling management.
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Bed Bath & Beyond built its brand for 52 years. In 2011, it had over 1,100 locations, making it a nationwide company. Its revenue topped $10 billion.
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Overstock.com can sell thousands of products under the Bed Bath & Beyond brand. In many quarters, Bed Bath & Beyond’s brand is better known than Overstock.com’s, which makes the move a real coup.
Overstock.com’s stock should have risen when it bought Bed Bath & Beyond’s assets. It got a brand that was half a century in the making and was still very well known among consumers.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
