Brand Heritage Isn’t Built Overnight

The comeback of Bed Bath & Beyond

Remember Bed Bath & Beyond? The well-known home goods store that stocked suburban bathrooms and kitchens across the US. You know, the go-to spot for a new shower curtain, dish towels, or a duvet cover.

I have a vague, childhood memory of roaming the Bed Bath & Beyond aisles in search of bath towels with my mom. Occasionally, I’d pick my head up from playing Pokemon on my Game Boy and wonder just how many more rows of shelves I had to walk through to find the “right” bath towel.

Older me realizes that Bed Bath & Beyond had an incredible selection across the home goods category, a real one-stop shop. When you had a home need, you hopped in the car and drove to your local Bed Bath & Beyond. They were the type of store you’d never guess would go out of business since they were providing essentials at reasonable prices all under one roof.

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Well, you might as well forget about them because the company filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Actually, even worse. Bed Bath & Beyond was in such dire financial shape that it ended up liquidating some of its key assets.

What plagued Bed Bath & Beyond, you might ask?

In the early 2000s, this thing called “e-commerce” became popular. And the most popular name in e-commerce, namely Amazon, stomped over any retailer that did not quickly adopt a digital strategy. Retailers like Walmart and Target quickly adapted to the latest technology, but Bed Bath & Beyond was too slow. After a series of bad decisions forced by attempts to play catch-up, the fifty-year-old retailer called it quits (great recap by NPR here on the reasons why they ultimately failed).

So that’s the end of Bed Bath & Beyond. Nothing more to discuss here.

Guess what? They are back. Well, sort of, but not in the way you might expect.

Bed Bath & Beyond sold its intellectual property (IP) in bankruptcy court to Overstock.com (yes, the website), forking over its name, likeness, and a few other intangible assets. Overstock.com bought the IP with the goal of rebranding its own site under the Bed Bath & Beyond name.

Why in the world would someone buy the IP of a defunct retailer that couldn’t keep up with the times?

Because of its brand.

Great brands are stories. And brands that stand the test of time have a story that spans multiple generations. I shared a story earlier of how I viewed the retailer from the lens of a little kid. As I got older and went off to college, Bed Bath & Beyond was my default choice for any home goods item to stock my dorm room. Vast selection was originally the bane of my existence as a kid who would rather sit on the couch and play video games. However, as an adult, the one-stop shop environment was much more appreciated. That vast selection I once found overwhelming became the exact reason I returned as a young adult. My story evolved over time, which was only possible thanks to Bed Bath & Beyond staying consistent with their brand and customer experience.

Millions of people throughout the US have a story about Bed Bath & Beyond. And I bet their story has changed as the years passed too, but that story is always anchoring on the reliability and the affordability of the chain retailer. I’m sure my mom’s Bed Bath & Beyond story has changed too; a place where she had to drag her annoying little son to somewhere she was able to shop in peace.

Building on this point, there’s this concept called brand heritage. How I define “heritage” in the consumer brand space is centered around trust and authenticity over a very long-time range. Brands like Coca-Cola, Disney, and Hermes were all founded over one hundred years ago.

Although their business models have grown exponentially, their respective brand ethos have stayed relatively constant over the years. Think about it for yourself: how do you view the three brands mentioned above? You may have a specific story for each brand, however your story and someone else’s likely anchor around the reliability of brand trust and authenticity.

While many consumer brands balance investing in their brand with meeting quarterly earnings results (like Nike’s recent woes, however I do believe Nike has heritage too), heritage brands realize that brand investments are the only choice to win in the short-and-long-term.

Heritage creates breathing room to not have to rely so much on digital advertising for performance boosts. Sure, new competitors may make a splash, but the level of customer loyalty developed over decades through consistency helps insulate the most cunning of challenger brands. Heritage creates moat.

There are countless consumer brands popping up every year. You see them on the aisles in the grocery store, or across your Instagram feed. I wonder which brands coming up today will build heritage over time. In 2075, who are we still relying on for a consistent brand and customer experience? The brands that were able to navigate meeting short-term financial targets with long-term aspirations. In How to Build a Category-Defining Consumer Brand in 2025: Part I, we chatted about how recent CPG innovation is on the form of products, not the core product itself. Do Graza (squeezable olive oil) or Create (creatine gummies) have a chance of becoming a heritage brand? Time will tell.

It's important to note that Coca-Cola, Disney, and Hermes weren’t built on the back of Meta or Google advertising. But they didn’t need to be. Today, digital advertising is essentially a requirement to scaling a consumer brand. Which makes sense, you need to show up where consumers are, being online. In my opinion, I think it’s tougher to create heritage online as the buying experience is more transactional and commoditized. In person, there’s much more of an opportunity to develop an emotional connection with a brand (think in a grocery aisle, Disney World, or a Hermes store) than checking out on a Shopify storefront. With that being said, I’ll expand on this point further in a future post as I think the challenges digitally native brands face regarding building heritage are uniquely difficult.

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Whether you believe in Bed Bath & Beyond’s brand heritage or not, Overstock.com certainly does. Maybe they’re betting on your memory too. I’d argue Overstock.com doesn’t have much of a brand presence and when the rare opportunity to acquire the name and website of an omnipresent retailer came into play, they had to jump on it. Now Overstock.com can sell its products under a name that so many generations trust.