Walmart To Sell Plus-Sized Clothing Brand Eloquii — Retail Bum

Walmart has announced plans to sell its plus-size fashion brand Eloquii Inc to FullBeauty Brands for an undisclosed amount.

The retail giant acquired the brand for $100 million in 2018 in an effort to better appeal to younger shoppers and position itself against rising competition from Amazon.

“Eloquii joined Walmart’s portfolio of digitally native vertical brands to expand our Women’s assortment in sizes 14+ and offers unique and differentiated products in an underserved but growing segment,” Walmart spokesperson Jaeme Laczkowski said in a statement. “Since acquiring Eloquii, Walmart.com has grown to hundreds of millions of items, and we’ve decided it’s the right time to sell Eloquii.”

Walmart’s decision to sell Eloquii comes just a week after it sold Bonobos to Express Inc. and WHP Global for $75 million, significantly lower than the $310 million it had spent on acquiring the brand in 2017 under the leadership of Marc Lore, the founder of Jet.com and Walmart’s former eCommerce president. It follows the company’s recent efforts to streamline and focus on improving its core business areas.

“We’re now in a phase that is less about scaling store pickup and delivery, eCommerce assortment, and eCommerce [fulfillment center] square footage, and more about execution and operating margin improvement,” said Walmart CEO Doug McMillon at the company’s investor day earlier in April 2023.

Photo credit: Eloquii

Originally published at https://retailbum.com on April 24, 2023.