MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Bed Bath & Bankruptcy: Lessons for Senior Leaders

Bed Bath & Beyond (BB&B) finally filed for bankruptcy on April 23, 2023, after surviving a near-death experience earlier in the year thanks to a last-minute equity infusion from an opportunistic investor. The termination of that agreement and the subsequent failure to raise sufficient capital through new share issuance and other financing techniques meant that the company had exhausted the capacity of creative financial engineering to stay in business.

The financially focused strategy initiated by a new management team installed in 2019 ultimately couldn’t save the struggling retailer. To diagnose why their approach was so misguided and what lessons senior leaders should learn, we surveyed more than 1,600 retail shoppers in the months before BB&B declared bankruptcy.

About the Author

Jonathan Knowles is the founder of the advisory firm Type 2 Consulting. Russell Baris is president of eLumindata, a data science firm in Westport, Connecticut. B. Tom Hunsaker is on the strategy and leadership faculty at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. Richard Ettenson is a professor and the Kieckhefer Fellow of Global Marketing and Brand Strategy at Thunderbird.

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