FORT COLLINS, Colo. (BRAIN) — TJX Companies Inc., which bought outdoor discounter Sierra Trading Post in 2012, is planning to expand STP’s brick and mortar business.
STP operates a website and catalog business in addition to four “outlet” retail stores. While the retailer’s biggest categories are outdoors and fashion, it often carries bike product closeouts as well, ranging from helmets to complete bikes, frames and wheels.
In an earnings call Wednesday, TJX CEO Carol Mayrowitz said the company plans to open two new STP locations late this year.
TJX operates more than 3,000 TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, HomeSense and T.K. Maxx stores in the U.S., Canada and Europe. TJX paid $200 million for STP, saying it was acquiring the brand in part for its expertise in e-commerce. The company launched its first TJMaxx e-commerce site last fall.
One of the new STP stores will be in Fort Collins, Colo., where it will anchor a revitalized retail space along with trendy grocery Trader Joe’s, according to an article in TheColoradoan. A TJX representative told the paper that the 25,000-square-foot Fort Collins store would be the chain’s “flagship” location. Fort Collins is about an hour south of Cheyenne, Wyo., where STP is based and where it operates an outlet store. The company did not say where the second new location will be.
Mayrowitz said the new stores would be different from STP’s outlet locations and more like TJX’s HomeGoods stores.
“We’re creating a brand new prototype,” she said in the earnings calls. “So it is going to look very different from the Sierra stores today. We’re really – if you think of it like again the idea of a HomeGoods field in the outdoors space, but it’s going to have some very unique things. It’s going to be pretty interesting. It’s going to have a real unique look. But value, value, value, I can’t say it enough in every category. That’s what we’re going after.”
STP’s other outlet stores are Cody, Wyo., Reno, Nev., and Boise, Idaho.
TJX announced Wednesday that net sales for its most recent fiscal year were $27.4 billion, a 6 percent increase over the previous year. Consolidated comparable store sales increased 3 percent and net income for the fiscal year was $2.1 billion.
TJX Companies is traded on the NYSE under the TJX symbol. Mayrowitz’s quotes are from an earnings call transcript produced by SeekingAlpha.com.
