Discount chains Five Below and Dollar Tree are snapping up former Party City locations amid a tight market for brick-and-mortar retail space.

The party supply store auctioned off 250 locations this month as part of its ongoing bankruptcy process, and the dueling discount chains successfully bid on a combined 148 leases, according to CoStar. The rest of the leases went to off-price retailers such as Rack Room Shoes, Books-A-Million, and Burlington Stores, as well as specialty retailers such as Barnes & Noble and La-Z-Boy.

• The auction preceded the $20 million sale last week of Party City’s intellectual property and wholesale operations to New Amscan, an affiliate of Ad Populum, which sells pop culture goods and costumes globally.

While the Party City closures might seem like more evidence of the long-predicted but not quite realized “retail apocalypse,” the bidding process is conversely showing the strength of the sector.

“We’ve seen the uptick in closures and bankruptcies, but the flip side we’ve seen that really strong demand to backfill that space, at least where it’s well-located and not cannibalizing the existing footprint of retailers,” Brandon Svec, national director of US retail analytics at CoStar, told Retail Brew.

Keep reading here.—AV

No one gets into a lather quite like a soap company, so perhaps a recent salvo from Dr. Bronner’s, the 77-year-old personal care brand with the famously wordy packaging, should come as no surprise.

Dr. Bronner’s, which has the highest rating among all 76 brands certified by B Lab, which evaluates companies on what it calls “a company’s entire social and environmental impact,” recently announced it is dropping that certification. The announcement comes after years of advocacy from Dr. Bronner’s for B Lab to reform its certification, which the soap maker contends lacks vigor and allows undeserving companies to be certified and to use their certification to counteract bad press over unethical business practices.

“Despite our multi-year effort urging B Lab to strengthen its standards,” Dr. Bronner’s wrote in a February 11 Instagram post, “they have allowed the subsidiaries of multinational companies—that have histories of socially & environmentally destructive practices in their supply chains—to obtain the certification & use it to greenwash their branding.⁣” Fast Company reported that while the company previously paid a fee that will keep it listed on the B Lab site through September, it has “already begun removing the B Corp logo from branding and marketing materials.”

Keep reading here.—AAN

On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Laurel Orley is co-founder and CEO of Daily Crunch, a sprouted nut brand sold at retailers like Whole Foods, Target, and CVS.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I’m the crunch executive officer of a sprouted nut snack company. Sprouted nuts go through a soak-sprout-dehydrate process that makes nuts and seeds easier to digest, more nutrient dense and crunchier than raw or roasted nuts.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? A lot of the most important things I do are boring and not LinkedIn-worthy. Some of this includes financial modeling, operations, ingredient sourcing, and all those other fiduciary responsibilities. As my old boss told me in my Unilever days, we have a fiduciary responsibility above all else. Getting accolades and awards are amazing but if you don’t get your financials in order, nothing else matters. That’s not on LinkedIn.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Expo West is my favorite project of the year! It’s the largest natural products trade show in the US. It’s impressive how much effort goes into preparing for something of that scale. The buzz of being surrounded by so many innovative brands and discovering new trends is exhilarating. Getting to meet the founders behind my favorite brands and ideating with them at Expo West is just the best.

Keep reading here.—EC

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