The new company operating Big Lots stores post-bankruptcy plans to divert from choices made by the chain’s previous management. Instead, the company plans to scale back the furniture selection and lean into low-priced, name-brand apparel while maintaining the brand’s identity.

In an exclusive interview with Modern Retail, Lisa Seigies, president and CEO of Variety Wholesalers — which also operates Roses Discount Stores, a chain of stores primarily in the South — said the company acquired Big Lots to tap into a new, higher-income demographic.

She sees the brands as two distinct companies with two different customers. The chains overlap in about 60 communities, so it was important for Variety to differentiate the two. Seigies’s goals for the future of Big Lots include providing customers with deals from well-known brands while maintaining the employees and community of the pre-bankruptcy chain.

“Personally, I love the Big Lots brand; I always thought they did a great job as merchants,” Seigies said, adding that the new Big Lots mantra will be “brands for less,” bringing in products from Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors and Andrew Marc, priced competitively with other off-price retailers. “That makes the store more interesting and sets it apart from Roses.”

Still, the new Big Lots will operate from two existing Roses distribution centers in Newnan, Georgia and Henderson, North Carolina.

Bill Read, evp of corporate services and leasing for Birmingham-based real estate firm Retail Specialists, noted that other chains may acquire leases for 30 or 40 locations at a time, while Variety is doing hundreds over the course of a few months while reimagining the previous company’s concept. Similarly, last year, Dollar Tree took over the leases of 170 99 Cents Only stores in Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas while acquiring the intellectual property as well as some furniture, fixtures and equipment.

“It is one of the most ambitious plans you can think of from a retailer that not everybody’s heard of,” Read said, referring to Variety, adding that the thrill of discovery found today at retailers like Ollie’s Bargain Outlet will be key to reestablishing Big Lots. “I think Big Lots got to the point where, if you were in some other newer stores, they were very clean, modern and merchandised, and it took away the feel of a treasure hunt.”

Seigies wants to take Big Lots “back to its roots” of offering big deals established when Sol Shenk founded the chain’s predecessor in 1967. Shenk would do this by buying merchandise including auto parts and vehicles from production overruns and bankruptcies.

More recently, the pre-bankruptcy company had focused more on furniture and had tested a new home furnishing-centric store format, Big Lots Home, in 2023. Seigies said the company isn’t entirely ditching the category but will focus less on large furniture items and more on smaller home decor items and accessories like rugs and lamps, complementing the rest of the store.

“If a customer wants furniture for less, they would have gone to Big Lots, but there wasn’t a reason to excite the customer beyond furniture,” Seigies said. “If we get a deal on a recliner at a great price, we will buy recliners; if we get deals on sofas, we’ll get sofas.”

Seigies said, through early discussions with customers and brand research, the company has repeatedly heard that people loved finding a different new deal each time they would go into a Big Lots store. The new company plans to do that.

“Because of the way you buy closeouts and deals, you don’t always have the same product in every store, and that’s what makes it exciting,” Seigies said. “You’ll have a customer that will go from store to store for that treasure hunt.”

She also maintains that the chain will now be an everyday low price retailer, as customers would previously get confused when they would go to a Big Lots and come back another day and find out the item was only on sale for a limited time, missing out on the lower price.

Big Lots has many competitors in the off-price and discount store space, from TJ Maxx to Ollie’s Bargain Outlet, which took over 40 leases earlier this year for Big Lots stores not acquired by Variety. Unlike some, Big Lots will continue to have shelf-stable grocery products and essentials: paper cups, toilet paper, napkins, canned food, packaged food and cleaning supplies, just not fresh food.

“The differentiator is we’re creating a one-stop shop,” Seigies said. “We have nonperishable grocery — we fill that need. You can outfit your home from bed to bath to kitchen, and then you can buy apparel for you, your family, your children and your pet.”

Seigies said that because the company so quickly went from acquisition to finalizing staff in February and expanding its distribution centers to accommodate Big Lots, the product assortment will not be perfect right away. “We knew going into this so quickly that the assortments wouldn’t be perfect because the seasonality pieces were what’s missing,” she said. “We’re in the spring season now, and in order to have lawn and garden, I would have had to source that from overseas last year.”

Still, the company purchased product for Big Lots even before finalizing the acquisition in anticipation of tariffs. “We knew that if this administration came in, there would be tariffs,” she said. “We said, ‘Let’s go out and look for merchandise that we would buy for Big Lots.’ And if the deal didn’t happen, we knew we could sell it in Roses.”

The reason behind Variety’s urgency in getting the stores back open was keeping the staff intact, Seigies said. The company said it retained about 65% of its store-level team members. Seigies said the company kept most of its store managers and assistant managers and hired a couple hundred people in corporate.

“You want the buyers on the Big Lots side to be different from the buyers on the Roses side,” she said. “It keeps the community feel, but they understand the brand, and that’s the way we’ll be able to continue to differentiate the two companies — by having two different thought processes, focusing on who that customer is and not trying to solve for both.”

Seigies said that when visiting stores a few weeks ago, before making announcements on whether they’re staying open, store managers were adamant about wanting to stay open. And she noticed that, throughout liquidation, she was impressed by the quality of the stores.

“They were so proud of what they did, that even though they had the yellow signs up, the store was perfect and it was being shopped,” she said. “That was what really forced us to move quickly, so that we could bring back that community, or keep that community employed. We didn’t want to lose that love for the store.”

Seigies also hopes to repair and maintain Big Lots’ vendor relationships. The previous company had about $66 million in claims from vendors, according to Bloomberg Law.

“The vendors have gone through this, through so many bankruptcies, that I think they were happy to have Variety buy the company,” she said, adding that Variety’s credit rating and track record of paying bills on time gave vendors reassurance they could work with Big Lots again. “It gives them an opportunity to make up their losses.”