When a company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the hope is it remerges like a phoenix from the ashes and lives a new life.

For Bed Bath & Beyond, Chapter 11 restructuring will involve, among other things, shedding its stores and new retailers taking over the leases. Once it exits bankruptcy, the company will have to come up with a new strategy, which may be an online-only or e-commerce-led approach. But the experts Retail Brew spoke with said that the company will have to learn from its previous mistakes for a revival like this to work.

“Bed Bath & Beyond’s product set is in direct competition with very established online retail/delivery groups,” Justin Grochoski, solution engineering manager for retail and CPG at Celonis, told Retail Brew.

“This sort of round-trip channel where you’re selling online, but people are returning and refunding ‘in store,’ it’s a pretty common theme. I think Bed Bath & Beyond can get that right by having some sort of physical presence and maintaining some sort of high-touch element with our customers, they can maybe survive.”

First, everything must go: Part of the bankruptcy process will involve Bed Bath & Beyond potentially shedding its nearly 500 stores, which include Buy Baby locations. Toronto-based retailer Canadian Tire already plans to acquire 10 of the leases for $1.6 million.

There’s also an opportunity for off-price, discount retailers and pharmacies to snatch them up, Deborah Weinswig, CEO of Coresight Research, told CNBC.

• And the appetite may be there, considering last year saw store openings outpace closures for the first time since 2016, according to Coresight Research cited by CNBC.

Keep reading here.—KM

Retailers and brands are facing some pretty sizable challenges these days. The trick to staying on top and crushing all your channels? Two words: unified platform. Siloed solutions cost time and $$$—one consolidated, integrated platform is *chef’s kiss* perfect.

That’s where Listrak comes in. As a leading customer engagement platform trusted by brands like TOMS and Sol de Janeiro, they can help you drive engagement and reduce spend by orchestrating marketing across all channels: email, SMS, push notifications, and identity resolution.

Listrak’s new Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study revealed how beneficial their tools can be to a biz. Interviewed clients saw:

• a 45% increase in email-driven revenue
• a 40% increase in SMS-driven revenue
• 20% time savings for the campaign team
• 35% reduced marketing-tool spend

Wanna start acing the marketing game? Read the study.

These days it seems like everyone’s got a chabot—you can’t turn around without bumping into an announcement about a new offering powered by natural language processing (NLP).

Many of these solutions are consumer facing, helping with shopping or returns.

But what if companies could ask ChatGPT questions about consumers? What if, instead of hallucinating answers based on data culled from the internet circa 2021, a chatbot was trained on specific consumer data?

That’s the approach that market intelligence platform Native AI is taking: interpreting unstructured shopper data with NLP, building “digital twins” of consumers, then using generative AI to allow brands to talk to virtual representations of their own shoppers in a ChatGPT-esque interface.

As consumers leave “clues” about their preferences and consumption habits (including SKU-level data like product reviews from around the web) Native creates a digital clone (a representation of an individual shopper, used to predict behavior in various scenarios) explained Native AI’s CEO and co-founder Frank Pica.

“It’s tokenized, no [personal identifiable information] so we don’t know it’s you,” he added. “But that’s where generative AI comes in—you can actually create very accurate outputs that allow you to really talk…directly to [consumers].”

So, what does that look like in practice? For energy drink maker EBoost, talking with these shopper simulations has helped the company understand the competitive landscape of new products and key in on the attributes that keep their buyers coming back for more.

Keep reading here.—MA

Glad you’re joining us this week. A public service announcement: Mother’s Day is next Sunday, so remember to grab your mom a gift. Maybe our first entry will make that a little easier.

In sales: Starting today, shopping platform Rakuten is having its largest sales event of the year, Big Give Week. Rakuten is known for offering cash back and rewards, and its members will be able to get deals from participating retailers including Crocs, Banana Republic, GameStop, and others.

• “While we are approaching the highly anticipated summer season, inflation and a potential recession are still in the back of consumers’ minds so shoppers are preparing with an eye for savings,” Rakuten president Kristen Gall said in a statement.

In earnings: Chinese e-commerce company JD.com will host its quarterly earnings call on Thursday. In March, JD.com, which is still recovering from pandemic restrictions in China, missed Q4 revenue forecasts and explained it will take some time for consumer confidence to return.

Meanwhile, PayPal today will release its first earnings report since laying off 2,000 employees, or 7% of its workforce, earlier this year. Analysts predict its profits could increase more than 50% as a result.

Keep reading here.—KM

Today’s top retail reads.

No dupe for you: How brands like Lululemon are taking on “dupes,” which are not counterfeits but rather look-alikes by other brands with lower price tags. (CNN)

Sit out of luck: Why seating in stores is increasingly rare. “Basically, what the empirical data is showing through these studies is that sales are higher when people are moving and circulating,” said Charles MacPhee, who teaches construction management at Northwestern Michigan College. (Marketplace)

Budding markets: These states might be the next to legalize recreational retail cannabis sales. (CNBC)

At the mall, it’s where band tees are the only tees. In Retail Brew, it’s where we invite readers to weigh in on a trending retail topic.

To give cash-strapped residents a break, Tennessee is waving taxes at grocery stores from August through October.

You tell us: Whether or not you live in Tennessee, how would having grocery taxes waived impact your grocery shopping behavior? Cast your vote here.

Circling back: Last week, we noted that because Bed Bath & Beyond had filed for bankruptcy, it was no longer accepting its ubiquitous 20% off coupons, and we asked what your relationship was with the coupons. For many of you, it was hot and heavy, with 59.4% having used the coupons more than 10 times, and 27.3% having used the coupons fewer than 10 times. Only 8.6% never used the Bed Bath & Beyond coupon and weren’t urged by friends or family to do so, while another 4.7% never used the coupon but had been urged by friends or family to do so.

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• What makes a brand or a product “hot”?
• Inside beverage brand Swoon’s Barbie collaboration
• How Topicals is building a brand ambassador ecosystem on the blockchain