Written by Donna Barson, Senior Associate at Kline
The Bed Bath & Beyond chain of home goods stores isn’t the first place one might think of as a key retail channel for beauty and grooming products, but that may be changing in the future. Since the company purchased the Harmon health and beauty care chain in 2002, it has been putting Harmon departments in its other stores. The company is becoming more aggressive with acquiring new companies, as well as opening new locations, and is further focusing on a cross-pollination strategy, bringing themes from one type of store into another.
Bed Bath & Beyond acquires Cost Plus World Market, as well as Linen Holdings, in 2012. In the past year, the company opens a total of 41 new stores while continuing to add Harmon departments. Even Cost Plus World Market, which has traditionally focused on edible goods and eclectic décor, now has cosmetics and toiletries in some locations. Kline expects that the company will continue to integrate additional departments within its stores with merchandise obtained via relationships with vendors from sister concepts. Therefore, it is likely that more Harmon departments will open in most or all of the retailer’s stores.
This strategic move could prove a game changer for the cosmetics and toiletries industry if Bed Bath & Beyond continues adding such departments in all of its locations, which now include 1,004 Bed Bath & Beyond stores, 74 Christmas Tree Shops stores, 82 buybuy BABY stores, and 264 Cost Plus World Market stores (acquired in 2012). Of the 1,471 total stores the company currently operates (which include 47 Harmon stores), 1,437 are located in the United States, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, while 34 stores are located in Canada.
In 2010, Bed Bath & Beyond opened up the first ever L’Oréal boutique within a store, at its East 61st St. and 1st Avenue location on the upper east side of Manhattan. It has beauty advisors trained by L’Oréal. This experiment has been successful and the boutique is flourishing today. With cosmetic and toiletry departments rolling out within Bed Bath & Beyond’s other stores make a very real possibility of the company owning over 1,400 cosmetics and toiletries retail locations within the United States.
These insights, with much greater detail and analysis can be found in Kline’s soon-to-be-released Beauty Retailing USA: Channel Analysis and Opportunities report. The study gives sales figures of every cosmetic and toiletry category across all sales channels and sub-channels, such as direct sales broken out by Internet, infomercials, person-to-person, etc. It also contains detailed channel profiles and profiles an array of retailers including Amazon.com, Ricky’s, and Bed Bath & Beyond.
