WWD reports:
Bath & Body Works is reinventing itself once again, by rethinking its experiment with outside prestige beauty brands and cutting its vendor list in half.
Four years ago, the vertical retailer heralded an internal revolution by tilting its business model to add a selection of outside brands to a smattering of doors in its chain. The shift in strategy reinvented BBW from an affordable purveyor of scented lotions and bath gels to a beauty apothecary that aimed to go head-to-head with Sephora to procure emerging brands.
The change plugged into BBW's then-chief executive officer Neil Fiske's trademark "trading up" strategy, which surmised that shoppers are already spending money, but they will spend more money in the right environment...
The concept caught on with niche beauty brands, many of which didn't have the might to do business with department stores, and fed shoppers' desire for discovery. At the height of the strategy two years ago, BBW had inked distribution deals with 80 beauty vendors, including Frédéric Fekkai, Molton Brown, Awake, Ahava, Vincent Longo cosmetics, Jaqua and Supersmile.
The retailer has since cut that number in half, and currently plans to carry about 40 outside — or third-party — brands in its 110 flagships across its 1,600-door chain, said Diane Neal, who replaced Fiske as ceo of BBW. Brands that have left or are slated to leave flagships by yearend include DDF, Peter Thomas Roth, Korres, Juvena and the retailer's proprietary line, The Savannah Bee Company.
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