Brookstone History

Wikipedia does a terrible job at presenting business history. They only report businesses that they believe are significant. Business innovation usually occurs in small firms. So Wikipedia misses the meat of the market

Unfortunately, Wikipedia has effectively destroyed the market for private historical research.

I dabbled my toe in researching business history. Since I have no money, I decided I might try by starting with companies that offered affiliate programs.

The problem with this is that people interested in history rarely buy stuff. Some people are so put off by the word "affiliate" that they block all ads and refuse to visit sites with affiliate links. Even worse, some marketing companies dislike people who research corporate histories.

I was looking at LeoFinance. Publishing through LEO might help me offset my webhosting fees and might provide an audience interested in my research.

A Nested Structure

Business history is a multidimensional affair that involves a network of entrepreneurs, banks and a variety of financial institutions. I think I will be able to capture some of this history with a multidimensional database structure. Generally, my tendency is to to start a project by creating a database, then creating a mechanism that drills through the database.

However, I decided in this case to start by focusing first on the finding a mechanism to display the data.

What I am doing in the first phase of the project is simply creating articles that include nested HTML lists that contain the data. After I have a solid understanding of the info I want to display, I will define the database structure and parse the lists into the database.

I have several hundred pages so far. Any page could be an entry point.

Brookstone

I was looking at Brookstone the other day. This company sells upper end gifts and travel products. They kicked me out of their affiliate program several years ago. They let me back in last month; So I decided to update my page on Brookstone.

The official history of Brookstone is compelling. The company was founded by Pierre de Beaumont who loved tinkering with things at the family farm which was called Brookstone. The company officially started with a $500 investment and an ad in "Popular Mechanics" and became legendary.

The official story is compelling. It turns out that the company has a backstory which is even more interesting:

Pierre de Beaumont just happened to be the only son of Compte François de Beaumont (a French nobleman) and Aedita Stuart who was the daughter of an American diplomat named Richard Stuart. Were De Beaumont to move to Europe, he could have claimed title as a nobleman.

Compte François de Beaumont died during World War I. Aedita decided to travel the world. She adopted the state name Gypsy Norman and traveled the world as a chorus girl and actress.

In 1925 Aedita married Bud Fisher. In 1907 Bud Fisher began drawing a daily comic for the San Francisco Chronical. The comic was drawn in side by side panes which became known as a comic strip. Many consider this to be the first comic strip (there are other contenders).

The picture, published in 1918, shows the characters. The image is public domain. I drew the photo from Wikicommons so it should be public domain as well.

Apparently the marriage of a Cartoonist and a noblewoman traveling the world as a gypsy chorus girl was a major splash on the social columns in both San Francisco and New York.

So, the family was famous and the Brookstone farm in the Berkshires was likely more of an estate than a ramshackle barn.

Pierre de Beaumont received a top notch education and became an engineer for Packard Motor and General Motors before starting his side career as tinkerer.

The back story behind the founding of the firm is more interesting than the rags to riches story of a person making it big with a $500 investment.

Pierre inherited the IP for the Mutt and Jeff comics. So, Brookstone owned one of the first syndicated cartoons giving the company coast to coast media contacts.

Anyway, Beaumont bought an ad in Popular Mechanics. He sent catalogs to people who bought the product. This marketing structure used to work.

Today this marketing technique is called "spam." I hate that it is impossible to buy a product from an online shop without being shoved onto a mailing list.

This shows an interesting aspect of marketing: The first use of a marketing technique is usually perceived as novel. Those who repeat the technique are annoying.

Brookstone opened a brick and mortar store by their distribution center. The company tried to expand with other stores and discovered that things that sell well in catalogs don't sell well in stores and visa versa.

The retail stores developed a different distribution channel with different products than the catalog. This created a mess because the public wanted their catalog items to be serviceable by the stores and people who weren't near stores wanted to buy store items with the catalog.

As they were trying to reorganize the distribution mess a small firm called Quaker Oats Company bought the chain.

Strike that last paragraph. A huge conglomerate with its fingers in ever pie bought the chain and rolled out the store in malls across the nation.

Quaker funded the expansion of Brookstone throughout malls across the US. Quaker was having problems with its conglomerate structure and spun off Brookstone to investors in 1986. NOTE: Quaker is now part of Pepsi. I now need to research that behemoth.

The investors held an IPO in 1993 and built a huge warehouse in Missouri in an effort to combine their distribution channels.

The stated goal of the company was to transform its mall based stores into an interactive catalog. Customers could sit in a massage chair in the store and then order it from the catalog.

The retail apocalypse hit the company hard. In 2004 a group based in Singapore bought Brookstone for $430 million. The debt from the sale crippled the company. Brookstone missed a bond payment in 2014 and filed its first bankruptcy.

A group based in China led by Sailing Capital and Sanpower bought Brookstone for $173 million from the bankruptcy sale.

This debt laden acquisition did no better than the first. Brookstone filed its second bankruptcy in 2018. They closed their last 101 mall based stores.

In 2019, a company called Bluestar Alliance acquired the brand.

Bluestar Alliance is a company that buys up troubled brands. Their collection of brands includes Brookstone, Bebe, Hurley, Limited Too, English Laundry, etc.. The majority investor in Bluestar is a huge investment group group called B. Riley Financial.

Bluestar kept the catalog and 30 airport based stores. Bluestar sells branded products through multiple channels.

Anyway, I think corporate histories are fascinating. Brookstone shows a common pattern wherein a vibrant company gets acquired by a conglomerate after its founder's death. The conglomerate roles out the brand across the market. As the brand diminishes it passes through the hands of private equity firms that try to squeeze profit from the brand.

This was my first post with Leofinance.io .

I appreciate comments on this project. Do corporate histories work for Leo Finance? Do you like the nested link structure I am using to present the history? Does inclusion of affiliate links in history pages turn you off. Since I am not of French Nobility, I have to have a way to fund the research. The idea is to start with pages that might make money and fan out from there.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta