112. The Container Store and Bed Bath and Beyond Went Bankrupt. Here's What It Means for Your Home.

Two of the biggest names in home organizing went bankrupt and merged. Here's what it means for your clutter — and the one question to ask before buying another bin.

The Container Store went bankrupt. Bed Bath and Beyond already had. Now they've merged and are calling themselves the first Everything Home Company. If you've ever spent real money on bins and containers and your home still wasn't quite working — this episode explains exactly why, and what to do instead.

✅ Why The Container Store went bankrupt — and what the housing market, Amazon, and a pricing trap had to do with it 

✅ What the merger actually is right now, and what it isn't yet 

✅ Why "retail with a home visit attached" is a completely different thing from real organizing expertise 

✅ The one question to ask yourself before buying any organizing product 

✅ What this means if you're a professional organizer or a real estate agent

The right container doesn't create a system. You do. Start with the why, and the what follows from there.

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Transcript

Did you see that The Container Store is now going to be The Container Store + Bed Bath & Beyond? Yes, The Container Store, one of the biggest names in the get-organized business, and Bed Bath & Beyond, both went bankrupt, and now they’re coming together in the form of physical retail stores, along with the beloved 20% off coupons.

The question is why?

When a company makes a big move like this - two bankrupt brands merging, with physical retail returning, with a vision of becoming the "Everything Home Company" - the question we need to ask is: who is this actually for? Is it solving a problem consumers have? Or is it solving a problem the business has?


Understanding which it is tells you something really important about how the whole "buy your way to an organized home" industry actually works.

If you’re one of the many, many people who’s spent real money on bins and containers, but your home still isn’t quite working, this episode is going to explain why.

Welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living. I'm Zee Siman, The Choosy Organizer.
This podcast is for women who are done organizing everything and ready to be choosy about what matters, what's enough, and what can wait. 

This is episode 112.

As a professional organizer, I’ve spent many days in people's homes figuring out why their organizing systems break down. And when two of the biggest names in the buy-your-way-to-organized spaces both collapse and then find each other in bankruptcy, well my ears perked up.

And what I found will validate certain things for you as a consumer, and if you’re a professional organizer or a real estate agent, this will be of interest to you too.

So let’s start with why this coming together of the 2 brands is happening.


In December 2024, The Container Store filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They came out of it in January 2025. And then in April 2026, they were acquired by Bed Bath and Beyond. Yes, the same Bed Bath and Beyond that had its own bankruptcy in 2023. Now these two companies are now merging and opening co-branded stores together. In fact, the first one launched just a couple of weeks ago in May in Fort Worth, Texas.

The are several reasons The Container Store went bankrupt.

The first reason is the housing market. When mortgage rates hit near 8% and stayed elevated, people stopped buying and selling homes at their normal pace. And here is the pattern that a lot of people don’t think about. People organize when they move. New house, new closets, new storage system. It feels like the perfect time to refresh. Well when the housing market locked up, that whole wave of organizing activity disappeared with it. The Container Store felt that directly. Their business model depended on a cycle of residential mobility that just wasn’t there anymore.

The second reason is price competition. Amazon, Walmart, HomeGoods, and newer platforms like Temu, they started selling products that were close enough, for a whole lot less money. The Container Store's pricing was built on the assumption that customers were paying a premium over those other outlets for product curation and higher quality and organizing expertise. But when close enough substitutes were available from Amazon for half the price, that premium became hard for them to justify.

The third reason is that they were stuck in the middle. The Container Store product lines weren’t cheap enough to win on price, but they weren’t premium or differentiated enough to hold customers who were willing to pay more. That middle-tier positioning is a hard place to be when the market softens. A lot of the 2024 retail bankruptcies followed that same pattern.

And the fourth reason is that the pandemic organizing boom ran out. When the Marie Kondo Netflix show launched in 2019 and then the pandemic kept everyone at home, there was a huge organizing surge. The Container Store grew into that demand. When life normalized several years later, they were left overextended. Sales dropped roughly 23% over their last two fiscal years.

Now, maybe you know that The Container Store did have in-home organizers and closet designers. They still do. So the question is fair. If expertise was part of their premium offer and positioning, why didn’t that change the outcome?

The answer is that their in-home organizer model was built around product selection. The expertise was to help you, the customer, identify the products from the store that would fit your space. So the expertise existed to support a product sale. And their own marketing and job description materials described the closet design position as a sales-focused role combining customer service with design expertise. 

Well, when Amazon, Walmart and others started selling the same, or very similar, bins for less, customers decided that this product expertise wasn’t enough to warrant the premium pricing. It was retail with a home visit attached. That’s a different thing from independent professional organizing, and I’m going to come back to why that distinction matters.


Now Bed Bath and Beyond's story has a lot of the same threads. A similar pricing trap, similar reliance on home purchase activity, similar exposure to Amazon. They filed for bankruptcy back in April 2023, closed all their brick-and-mortar locations, and came back primarily as an online retailer.

Then Marcus Lemonis, the CEO who relaunched Bed Bath and Beyond, started acquiring. His company bought Overstock.com, BuyBuy Baby, and Kirkland's. And then in April of this year 2026, they also acquired The Container Store.

His stated vision is to build the first Everything Home Company. A combination of retail stores, plus home services like flooring and cabinetry installation, and eventually financial products, things like mortgages, home equity loans, and insurance. He’s called the physical retail side the relationship engine of the whole thing.

Now as a customer, you’re seeing a gap right now between the vision and what exists today. What you can walk into right now is a co-branded store with Container Store and Bed Bath and Beyond merchandise. The financial products are still being built. One mortgage partnership is expected to launch around July of this year. The residential real estate brokerage network that Marcus Lemonis has described is something he says he’s pursuing, but it doesn’t exist yet.

Retail analysts are divided on whether this is all going to work. Some see a real gap in the market that a combined home company could fill. But others are looking at what one analyst called a hodgepodge of struggling brands, and pointing out that combining them doesn’t automatically fix what was broken about each one individually. That concern has real precedent. Retail mergers often promise more than they deliver.

So, is this the future of home organizing retail? Well, it’s worth watching to see what will happen. At this moment, it’s more of a direction than a finished thing.

What does this mean for you as a consumer?

Well let's start with what I think is most useful for most of the people listening.

If you have spent money on bins, containers, and organizing products, and your home still feels like it is not quite working, I’m not entirely surprised. The industry that sold you those products was largely built on the idea that the right container is the solution to your organizing problem. And it turns out, that idea hasn’t even sustained the companies selling it. There is now just public evidence of what was always a shaky premise.

The reason clutter comes back after you buy the bins is that the bins don’t address why the clutter is there. An organizing system works only when it’s built around how a specific family actually moves through their specific home. If you haven’t figured out why a particular area keeps breaking down, what the actual friction is, where the decision-making isn’t happening, well a new container is just giving the problem a temporary location. That’s not a system.

So what do you actually do with this? Well, a few practical things.

First: containers are useful, but they come after the system. The Container Store going bankrupt doesn’t mean you should never buy a bin. It means buying the bin is not the starting point. You figure out the systems first. What belongs in this space? How does this area actually get used? What is the decision point that’s missing? The answers to those questions tell you what kind of container, if any, makes sense. Products belong inside a working system. They don’t create one.

Second: if you’re wondering whether you should still be shopping at The Container Store, it’s honestly too early to know what these stores will look like as the two brands fully combine. Their core organizing products are still available. The product quality questions are worth watching as the company evolves under the new ownership, but nothing has fundamentally changed for you in the short term.

Third, and this is the most useful one: ask yourself, before you buy any organizing product, do I already have a working system that this product would fit into? Or am I hoping that the product will create the system? That one question will save you a lot of money and a lot of disappointment. It’s the choosy question. And given that the entire industry just proved it needed us to not ask that question in order to survive, I think we should ask it every time.

Now for those of you who are professional organizers, I absolutely believe that The Container Store's failure is not a verdict on the organizing industry. It’s a verdict on one specific business model, which is retail-anchored organizing, where the expertise exists to support a product sale.

Independent professional organizing, where the diagnosis comes first and product recommendations follow from that, is a different thing. That model is not what failed here. The product-first model is what failed.

The industry is consolidating around scale and retail. What independent organizers offer is judgment, diagnosis, and trust built over the course of working in someone's actual home. Those two things don’t compete directly.

That service, where someone actually comes to your specific home, figures out why your specific systems keep breaking down, and builds something around how you actually live, I think it’s growing. When the big retail players pivot toward financial services and mortgages, the work that involves sitting with a client in a specific room and figuring out exactly why things pile up in the corner by the door becomes more differentiated, not less. Name what you do clearly. Diagnose first, products after. That positioning matters more now than it did five years ago, right?

For those of you in real estate, agents, relocation specialists, stagers, anyone working with families in home transitions, a couple of things are worth knowing.

First, the housing market that hurt The Container Store is still finding its footing. Rates are better than they were, but transaction volume hasn't fully bounced back quite yet, which means the move-in moment, when it comes, is still the highest-leverage organizing window there is. Build those relationships now, before the market really heats up. For a family moving into a new home, before habits form and before the boxes are emptied into random spots, that is the best possible time to build organizing systems. Those systems stick because there’s no existing clutter to work around. So if you haven’t built relationships with professional organizers in your market who offer move-in services, it’s worth doing so right now, so you’re ready when the volume rises.

Second, Marcus Lemonis has explicitly said he wants to build a residential real estate brokerage network as part of this Everything Home Company ecosystem. That network doesn’t exist yet, but the intention is on record in the SEC filings. The organizing and home retail industry seems to be actively moving toward the real estate transaction space. That might be worth being aware of as you think about your own referral ecosystem and positioning.

Professional relationships that are built on real expertise, not on product sales, are going to hold up well in that environment.

So, two major brands in the organizing space went bankrupt. They merged and are calling themselves the first Everything Home Company. Whether that works is uncertain. Retail analysts are watching it with real skepticism.

What I take from this story is that the product-first model of organizing has always been wrong. The Container Store went bankrupt because of the housing market, Amazon, and a middle-tier pricing trap. But underneath all of that was a business that needed consumers to keep believing that the right container would fix their organizing problems. When the external conditions of the market shifted, slower housing market, more competition, well that belief wasn’t enough to hold it up.

What lasts is diagnosis. Understanding the specific way a home is failing, and building a system around how the people in that home actually live. That holds through a pandemic boom, through a slow housing market, through whatever comes next in our ever-changing world.

What I want you to take away from today depends a little on where you’re sitting. For the consumer who’s been spending money on organizing products: start with the system, not the storage. Understand the why first, and what follows from that. For the professional organizer, the model that failed was retail with a home visit attached. What you do is different. Say that clearly. For the real estate professional, the move-in moment is still the highest-leverage organizing window there is. Build those relationships before the market is fully heated back up.

And for all of us, let’s be choosy about what we buy for our homes. Ask what the system is before you buy the solution. That question will always serve you well.

I’m so grateful that you’ve spent this time with me today. I’d love to hear your thoughts about The Container Store and Bed Bath and Beyond. Have you been to the new store in Fort Worth yet? What do you love about it or not? Are you excited to use the 20% off coupon again? What are your thoughts about the quality and value of their products? Put that all in the comments or send me a note to let me know.

And I hope you follow the podcast if you’re not already, so you don’t miss new episodes. There’s a new one each week.

Have a beautifully organized week. I'm Zee, and I'll see you on the next episode.