Bed Bath & Beyond and BuyBuy Baby will soon be brand siblings again.
Bed Bath & Beyond owner Beyond Inc. said on Monday that it entered into an agreement to acquire the BuyBuy Baby brand for $5 million.
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Beyond executive chairman Marcus Lemonis said that the two brands have been “synonymous with supporting families, their homes, and all of life’s milestones.”
Lemonis cited three specific drivers of the transaction. He said Beyond’s omnichannel partner Kirkland has the flexibility to integrate the BuyBuy Baby brand into Bed Bath & Beyond stores. He’s also eyeing the tokenization of a portion of BuyBuy Baby’s intellectual property (IP) on the tZERO platform, which could result in two separate offerings. One token would create a digital dividend payable to Beyond shareholders as of a specific record date, and the other would be an offering for new investors interested in owning a share of the IP. In each case, the token would provide a revenue share on the omnichannel revenue generated by the brand. Jefferies hardlines analyst Jonathan Matuszewski said the revenue share will start in 2026 with a 1 percent share on e-commerce sales and 0.5 percent on brick-and-mortar sales generated by the brand.
In addition, a third option is leveraging tZERO’s blockchain technology and the BuyBuy Baby assets to build a ledger that records all life events, from birth records to medical records and other key life events. “This initiative, which we’re calling the “LifeChain,” will integrate the consumer’s financial and digital assets into a single, secure digital wallet, supported by Salesforce and its Agentforce technology,” Beyond said.
The executive chairman said in October 2024 that there was a soft launch of its Baby & Beyond brand as part of the Bed Bath & Beyond family of nameplates. Lemonis also said then that Baby & Beyond will launch “in the future.” Matuszewski, who noted that Beyond will complete the transaction on or before March 25, said BuyBuy Baby will have its own sub-domain on the Bedbathandbeyond.com site, and will no longer operate on Shopify. It wasn’t immediately clear what will happen to the Baby & Beyond brand or if that was just a placeholder for some future baby category.
Earlier in October 2024, BuyBuy Baby owner Dream On Me Industries Inc. said it was closing all 11 BuyBuy Baby stores and that the operation would shift to an online-only operation. Baby retailer Dream On Me acquired the BuyBuy Baby IP and digital assets for $15.5 million when former owner Bed Bath & Beyond went bankrupt. It was considered a paltry sum for a business that was once thought to have been able to fetch between $630 million to $910 million in the summer of 2022 had Bed Bath & Beyond sold the asset prior to filing for Chapter 11 in April 2023.
According to Creditsafe’s credit analytics a few weeks after Dream On Me elected to shut down the Baby brand’s store operations, neither suppliers for BuyBuy Baby nor Dream On me were getting paid on time, suggesting cash flow challenges and weak liquidity. And while liquidity issues were one reason why stores needed to close, that’s likely another reason why the IP was sold for a price far less than what Dream On Me paid in 2023.