What to make of Beyond, the parent company for Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, buybuyBaby and a host of crypto and new age hocus-pocus endeavors that are beyond my pay grade?
On the one hand, its charismatic and utterly compelling ersatz CEO Marcus Lemonis continues to spin a good game, telling people — investors, shareholders and anyone else who will listen — every chance he gets about how the company is on the brink of something amazing with all sorts of things about to happen.
It will open, in connection with the retailer formerly known as Kirkland’s — now Brand House Collective — the first resurrected Bed Bath & Beyond physical store next month in Tennessee with more actual manifestations of itself on the way, five more short-term and a projected 75 by the end of next year, it says. It is adding luxury brands, including watch names like Rolex and Patek Philippe, to the Overstock website offerings in an effort to differentiate itself from the dozens — make that hundreds — of other off-price and closeout names that populate that corner of the retailosphere. It is talking about monetizing its blockchain assets, largely a holdover from its former existence as Overstock.com, in ways that sound impressive even if they are little hard for most of us mere mortals to understand.
OK, all of that is over there but over here is a collection of deeply disturbing facts and figures. In reporting its second quarter numbers results this week, it said its sales dropped just over 29 percent for the period versus a year ago, a time that was not all that terrific to begin with. Its bottom line showed a 55 improvement over last year but before you get all worked up, that still translated into a loss of $19 million, down from $42.5 million in 2024.
But wait, there’s more. The number of active customers dropped 30 percent and ordering frequency fell 5.4 percent. The little good news on this front was that the average order value was up 7.2 percent.
Lemonis, who made his name on reality TV — and everything that happens there is real, right? — mixed in his usual effervescent spiel on how much better things were going to get and just watch us now.
More stores are coming including Overstock and buybuyBaby locations, albeit though the latter and the BBB stores will bear little resistance to their original namesakes, save for the fact that they will accept those yellowing, folded-up, tattered and torn coupons from the good old days of Bed Bath.
What should not be lost in all of this is that since the conversion of Overstock to Beyond under its former management and continuing under Lemonis, Beyond has not made any money at all and its sales metrices continue to decline with less overall revenue than back when it was just operating Overstock.com.
Wall Street can’t quite figure out what to do with this company, save for any return of Reddit daytraders who once drove the former BBB company’s stock up several-fold before it eventually imploded. Beyond’s stock price is up about 3.5 percent since the start of the year, which it’s believed some speculators playing this more as a crypto investment than a retail one. Yet since Lemonis took over as essentially head of the company (he still doesn’t have the CEO title) its share price has plummeted by two-thirds.
Lemonis always seems to say the turnaround is just over there, around the next quarter, and perhaps it is. But up until now it’s been difficult to see past the smooth talk of tokens, digital currencies and whatever in the world is going on with the Kirkland deal.
In its last year as Overstock, the company did $1.5 billion in sales. At its peak Bed Bath & Beyond, combined with buybuyBaby, had annual revenues in the range of $10 billion. Last year Beyond Inc. reported about $1.4 billion in sales and that number continues to fall. Talk is talk but numbers are numbers. And the two are nowhere near in sync at Beyond Inc.
WarrensReport 