Bilt Rewards has announced a partnership with “the Bed Bath & Beyond portfolio, including Bed Bath & Beyond, The Container Store, Kirkland’s, Overstock, and buybuy BABY.” There are no details about the partnership yet, but ‘shopping items for home’ is a logical brand extension for Bilt.
The deal makes some sense because, like with Walgreens, they’re something of a troubled retailer whom I wouldn’t think to consider on their own except partnering with Bilt makes them more focal.
But… wait… what… This made me realize that Bed, Bath & Beyond (and buybuy BABY) still exist?
Bed Bed And Beyond Is Really Overstock.com Now?
The original Bed Bath & Beyond filed for bankruptcy in 2023, liquidated, and its stores (as well as those of buybuy BABY) closed in July 2023. At the end there had been 367 Bed Bath & Beyond and 115 buybuy BABY locations.
Overstock bought the Bed Bath & Beyond name IP and digital assets for $21.5 million and renamed itself first to Beyond, Inc. and then Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc. It began trading as $BBBY last summer.
Separately, buybuy BABY’s IP was purchased out of bankruptcy by another company which reopened a small number of stores, but closed them and last year Bed Bath and Beyond reacquired buybuy BABY for $5 million.
Bed Bath & Beyond is restarting physical retail small stores. And they’re distributing Bed Bath & Beyond products through The Container Store.
So Bed Bath & Beyond and buybuy BABY liquidated, but the brands were acquired by the former Overstock.com which took the name for its parent.
Bed Bath and Beyond (nee Overstock.com) is smaller than it was in 2019, and just as unprofitable, but burning somewhat less cash. It has a market cap that’s slightbelow below 2019 levels. And it’s much smaller scale than Bed Bath & Beyond was pre-pandemic as well.
It’s Now Run By The Guy From CNBC’s “The Profit”
Overstock turned Bed Bath & Beyond’s current CEO is Marcus Lemonis. He joined the board in October 2023, became Chairman in December of that year, executive chairman in February 2024, and CEO effective January 2026.
Born in Lebanon, he was adopted by a Greek and Lebanese family in Miami. Lee Iacocca was a family friend who invested to help Lemonis start an RV business. 30 years ago he ran for the Florida legislature as a Democrat. He later became CEO of Camping World, stepping down to become CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond.
In addition to CNBC’s ‘The Profit’ he started in HGTV’s “The Renovator” which lasted 2 episodes in 2022, and last summer debuted on Fox’s “The Fixer.”
Overstock’s Founder Is One Of The Most Interesting Men On The Planet
Patrick Byrne bought 60% of small online closeout business D2: Discounts Direct in 1999, renamed it Overstock.com, and used the dot.com crash as a supply source, buying excess and bankrupt inventory from failed or struggling online etailers and selling it online at discounts. It was a business model perfectly timed for the crash, and once offered genuinely good deals. Byrne ran the company until 2019.
He has a Dartmouth degree, a Cambridge masters as a Marshall Scholar, and a Stanford Ph.D. in philosophy. He has a black belt in tae kwon do and pursued a career in professional boxing. He’s a cancer survivor several times over and used to bike the entire United States for cancer awareness.
His father, Jack Byrne, turned around GEICO and sold it to Warren Buffett. Byrne describes Buffett as one of his mentors.
And he had a relationship with Russian spy Maria Butina, the gun rights activist who built relationships in U.S. conservative and NRA circles. She pled guilty in 2018 to conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of Russia and was sentenced in 2019 to 18 months, eventually being returned to Russia. The pair met at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in 2015.
According to Byrne, during their romantic relationship he suspected she might be connected to Russian intelligence and he informed the FBI, and that federal agents used his relationship as part of their political intelligence operation, with Butina offering access to Russian officials and oligarchs, and in exchange asking him to help connect her with the Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaigns. James Comey denied directing this.
He issued a statement in August 2019 saying he had helped with federal investigations tied to the 2016 election, talking about the ‘Deep State’ and ‘Men in Black’ and that he’d been encouraged to come forward by Warren Buffet (his “Omaha Rabbi”). He claimed to have been used by Obama-era officials to conduct political espionage and control the next president. Later that year he resigned from Overstock. He is no longer a major shareholder.
Byrne had build a headquarters campus for Overstock in Midvale, Utah that was shaped like a peace sign, because he was generally anti-war. Sadly that headquarters was sold to Salt Lake County in December 2024.
The family guy “I hope you stayed away from the beyond section” clip always gets me.
@Peter — “Oh… here are the coffee mugs…”
@Gary: Byrne. Didn’t he have an obsession with short sellers in Overstock?
@L3 yes he did. Lots of lawsuits, some of which he actually got paid on (coordinating negative research reports for shorting, not the synthetic shares/naked shorts claims if I recall correctly)
@Peter @1990 — Ha-haa!
I ran into Marcus Lemonis at an airport (I shall not name) recently. I was sort of surprised to see him flying commercial as he’s rumored to have a net worth north of $500 million. He really seems like a very nice guy in person. Super polite and humble.
And it is ALL cheap, Chinese, Temu-level crap. They even charge for returns. The wife made the mistake of buying something from that was damaged and missing parts. The only response I could ever get were emails that either written in Chinese or poorly-translated English. Had to do a chargeback which I easily won.
Buy Buy Baby was acquired by a baby furniture company after the original bankruptcy. Without any warning, BB&B (Overstock) re-acquired the company and stopped honoring gift cards from the store, even though this was a purchase of the company and not another bankruptcy. Many moms-to-be who had received gift cards as gifts or as part of buying furniture suddenly had worthless pieces of paper, and BB&B would not budge. Terrible way to do business.