Marcus Lemonis, the functional CEO of Beyond Inc. is embarking on a multifaceted campaign to broaden his Bed Bath & Beyond brand with third-party tie-ins, shop-in-shops and all kinds of initiatives to grow the business. So far those plans have been very much works in progress, and the company continues to put up pretty rotten financial results. Whether Lemonis’s (many) plans will actually work is very much open to question.

In the meantime, the company reported its third-quarter numbers on Thursday morning and they were positively dismal. Net revenues plummeted 16.6 percent to $311 million and the bottom line showed a $61 million loss. Oddly, its active customer count increased 21 percent over a year ago—when it had just taken over the Bed Bath & Beyond business—but orders delivered dropped 19 percent versus last year.

Over the past few weeks, Lemonis has announced the aforementioned initiatives, which he had hinted at before and has now made official.

First up, a $40 million investment and merchandising tie-in with The Container Store to set up Bed Bath & Beyond shop-in-shops within the locations of that troubled specialty chain, at the same time offering The Container Store’s brands—including its signature Elfa shelving program—on the Bed Bath & Beyond website.

Then the company debuted an even more convoluted arrangement with another struggling specialty chain. This time, it was a $25 million investment in Kirkland’s and a deal that will see the latter open five smaller-format Bed Bath & Beyond stores next year, perhaps with more to follow. Kirkland’s will also add select BBB products to its stores, sell its own merchandise through the latter’s website, and run its close-outs through the brand’s Overstock.com sister site.

Both of these deals include various back-office integrations in web development, operations and other assorted administrative areas. While the former Overstock.com was a pure-play online retailer and as such was considered above the bar operationally in e-commerce, numerous vendors have said the integration of the Bed Bath & Beyond brand has been a troubling ordeal so far.

Adding to the flurry of news coming from the company, Beyond Inc. said it would be laying off 20 percent of its workforce, mostly during its fiscal fourth quarter. Among those already let go is Carlisha Robinson, the former chief product officer, who had been with the company and its predecessor entity, Overstock, since 2022 and was promoted just seven months ago. Lemonis has shuffled the company’s C-suite several times since taking over last year, letting go several senior execs he had only recently hired or promoted.

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All of this comes as Beyond is putting a total of $65 million into what are essentially equity positions in the two retailers, seemingly belying Lemonis’s credo to run an asset-light company without financial investments. For a company with a poor balance sheet, it’s fair to say there’s nothing “light” about $65 million.

The intended result of the two deals is that the fabled Bed Bath & Beyond brand, tainted by years of decline and absent from the physical retail landscape since the summer of 2023, will once again be adorning storefronts and retail spaces as early 2025.

Exactly what shoppers will find in these spaces remains a little vague. The Container Store placements are said to be Bed Bath & Beyond–branded product—not merchandise from third-party vendors who might currently populate the Bed Bath & Beyond website.

Kirkland’s, however, will have goods from those vendors—although, its CEO, Amy Sullivan, was adamant in saying, “Kirkland’s certainly will be in the driver’s seat on those decisions,” regarding precisely what the merchandise will be. “Those will be stores that we assort, that we buy the inventory for and that we operate.”

For Lemonis, the moves play to his continued strategy of making Beyond Inc.—and specifically the Bed Bath & Beyond brand—more than just an e-commerce operation. He has already purchased the assets of online retailer Zulily, and in debuting Kirkland’s to its Bed Bath & Beyond website, the company proudly said it was “delighted to introduce Kirkland’s Home as a member of the Beyond family.” While the former still sees itself as an independent entity—it remains a public corporation—Lemonis may have other ideas for both it and The Container Store, also a freestanding public company.

The return of Bed Bath & Beyond to physical retail coincides, by the way, with the end of its former sister brand, BuyBuy Baby, as an operator of stores. It announced it was closing its 11 locations this month and would retreat to online only. In Canada, the renamed Bed Bath & Beyond stores—Rooms + Spaces—have essentially all been closed, save for departments within Toys R Us locations, which are owned by the same parent company. The only piece of what had been the 1,500-store Bed Bath & Beyond empire still out there is the World Market operation, with about 250 locations, including several new stores that have just opened. It is owned by private equity investors and its financial health is largely unknown.

But we do know Beyond’s numbers, and they continue to decline ever since taking over the Bed Bath & Beyond brand, even as it resurrected the Overstock business. Curiously, the company no longer identifies itself as a retailer: In its release accompanying earnings (or lack thereof), it described itself as “an asset-light e-commerce and affinity data monetization company,” a statement that seems to reflect Lemonis’s philosophy, if not exactly the reality on the ground. In a lengthy investor presentation on Thursday that clocked in at three hours and eight minutes—perhaps reflecting his television history—the chairman assigned much of the blame for the company’s current financial woes to the reestablishing of the Overstock business and the detangling of it from Bed Bath & Beyond. The presentation—he called it a “fireside chat”—featured a number of company executives whose questions and comments were frequently interrupted by Lemonis offering his own interpretations and responses.

Through all of this, the Beyond Inc. stock was having a very rough day. Investors were not at all impressed, trading the stock down to the mid-$6 range, a 30 percent plunge from the day before, down 75 percent year-to-date, and now at its lowest price in at least four years.

Lemonis seemingly had answers for all the company’s problems, using an endless stream of corporate-speak and on-trend language to say, literally: “The best is yet to come,” as one company executive put it. It was very much the Marcus Lemonis show, and whatever happens to Beyond Inc., it will be his performance that is rated.

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Warren Shoulberg is the former editor in chief for several leading B2B publications. He has been a guest lecturer at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business; received honors from the International Furnishings and Design Association and the Fashion Institute of Technology; and been cited by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media as a leading industry expert. His Retail Watch columns offer deep industry insights on major markets and product categories.