TORONTO — Bed Bath & Beyond Canada’s new owner is hoping to use online shopping to wake up the dormant brand before it makes a brick-and-mortar comeback.
Sleep Country Canada relaunched the home goods retailer Tuesday through an e-commerce website expected to precede stores opening next year.
The online revival comes about a year after Sleep Country purchased the Canadian and U.K. rights to the Bed Bath & Beyond name and logos from Overstock.com.
The online marketplace had picked up the trademarks in 2023, after Bed Bath & Beyond Canada filed for creditor protection and closed its stores amid “dramatic” declines in revenue. The U.S. arm of the company followed suit a few months later.
The retailer’s new Canadian iteration aims to revive the most cherished elements of the brand’s past but also take a more curated approach befitting an evolving market with the rise of e-commerce, new competitors such as H&M Home and Simons, the loss of Hudson’s Bay and sluggish home sales.
“We feel the timing is right and we feel like the market is ready for what we are doing,” Bed Bath & Beyond Canada president Carol Deacon said.
“There are endless options online … and there’s also a lot of other physical retail where there’s some very distinct styles and designs, but we think there’s an opportunity to make sure there’s a bit more choice.”
The new business will stock about 6,000 products in classic Bed Bath & Beyond categories like kitchen, decor, bedroom and bathroom, but also mix in trendier and domestic brands consumers are demanding.
That means shoppers will find KitchenAid, Umbra and Calvin Klein products alongside merchandise from Lacoste, Smeg and Sleep Country affiliates Endy, Bloom, Simba, and Silk and Snow.
While many parts of the Bed Bath & Beyond Canada business won’t dramatically change, two areas are being revamped significantly: furniture and baby.
The company is paring back on furniture, at least initially, because there’s a lot of competitors out there and it’s a category that is difficult for shipping, Deacon said.
With baby, it wants to focus more narrowly on products consumers could use to prepare their home for an infant rather than on everything tots would need.
“For us to come up with an offering across the home that we really were proud and comfortable with, we just went a bit narrower in some areas, but we know we will be expanding over time,” Deacon said.
That expansion will also eventually bring back the brick-and-mortar stores most customers remember Bed Bath & Beyond for.
The brand is still working out its store strategy but is on track to open a first location in late 2027, she said.
When it faltered in 2023, the company had 54 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 11 BuyBuy Baby locations.
Deacon signalled that the brand is unlikely to have the same kind of store count or hulking properties it once did.
“It will likely be a lot more focused than it was historically for Bed Bath & Beyond in terms of footprint and store size,” she said.