![]() “Customers used to go for big life events and then nothing until the next big life event,” says Lemonides. And much of that will focus on lower-cost items, the better to recruit shoppers earlier and keep them as they graduate from life stage to life stage. Tritton wants store brands to hit 30% of sales in a few years, up from 10% now. He is planning to launch 10 new Bed Bath & Beyond store brands in the next three years, with the first one coming in the spring. (Hello, department stores.) And here, Tritton again tapped into his own experience at Target. The tough part is poising a business to return to growth, rather than managing a slow decline. The result will be a smaller, and he hopes, more profitable company.īut any turnaround offers low-hanging fruit in its initial stages. He sold off the Christmas Tree Shops chain and other smaller businesses. In his first year, he proceeded to do the painful work of slimming down the company with reorganizations that eliminated thousands of jobs. “I told recruiters, ‘I want the Avengers of retail,’ and I got them.” Working with headhunters, he set about building his own team, poaching people from his alma maters Target and Nordstrom, as well as from retailers such as Gap, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Walmart, and Amazon. “They were expensive, and they were ineffective, so it wasn’t a hard decision,” he says. In a move that stunned many retail experts, just days before Christmas 2019 and just weeks into the job, Tritton sent six members of his C-suite packing. “Clearing away that clutter was a completely different skill set than curating good product,” says Lemonides. Next up for 2021: The Target alum plans to start 10 new store brands from scratch and vastly expand Bed Bath & Beyond’s assortment of inexpensive products.īut fixing his new company and its manifold problems would force the rookie CEO to go beyond his core strengths. (The company also owns the billion-dollar Buy Buy Baby chain as well as Harmon Face Values.) What’s more, he has overhauled Bed Bath & Beyond’s antiquated e-commerce and announced he would close 200 stores, or about a quarter of the $7-billion-a-year chain’s fleet, and renovate 450 others. ![]() Tritton, an Australian native, has wasted no time in his first year as CEO: He quickly purged his C-suite last year and sold off a bunch of businesses that brought about $2 billion a year in sales but hurt the overall bottom line, reducing the company’s heavy debt load significantly in the process. The stock, while worth only about a quarter of its all-time high in 2013, has risen sixfold since plumbing all-time lows back in March. ![]() So far so good: In its most recent quarter, the 49-year-old retailer reported a surprise increase in comparable sales, its first since 2016. The move, announced at Bed Bath & Beyond’s analyst day last month, is just one of a number of radical steps taken by the CEO since he took the reins a year ago Wednesday. He adds, “Customers don’t want to need a math degree to work out what value looks like.” What’s more, their overuse has muddled people’s sense of what Bed Bath & Beyond’s goods cost and are worth. “We overflooded the market with coupons,” Tritton tells Fortune. But Tritton is done with giving shoppers discounts that fail to gin up sales-perhaps because customers don’t really want them: Nearly half of all coupons go unused. That’s not to say Bed Bath & Beyond is done with coupons. But Bed Bath & Beyond has begun to rein in its addiction to giving shoppers coupons-and their addiction to getting them-as a centerpiece of CEO Mark Tritton’s efforts in his first year at the helm to restore the long beloved but troubled home goods retailer to glory.
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