Clint Engel
FORT WORTH, Texas — The Bombay Company is getting out of the Kids business.


The struggling Top 100 company said it will close all 60 of its BombayKids stores in the next 12 to 18 months as part of a multimillion-dollar effort to cut costs.

Through the second half of its current fiscal year, it will transition out of Kid at 20 combination Bombay-BombayKids units and expand the core offering in those showrooms, Chief Financial Officer Elaine Crowley said in a conference call with securities analysts.

Though attached to full-line Bombay stores, the company counts the Kids units separately, which means this year’s store closings this year will rise to 50 from the previously announced 30 or so stores. The 40 remaining Kids stores will close next year, Crowley said.

After figuring in openings of new full-line stores, by the end of the year Bombay’s store count will drop to 430 to 435, from the current 472.

David Stewart, Bombay’s new CEO, said exiting the Kids business is one of four initiatives under way or completed that will save the company $31 million a year in an effort to return the specialty home furnishings chain to positive cash flow. The KIDS move is expected to save $7 million. The others are:

* Reduce the headcount by 60 people. This has already been done through a combination of attrition, leaving positions unfilled and the layoff of 29 employees for $7 million in savings. Among the cuts: Three executives in human resources, information technology and marketing.

* Trim advertising by $6 million, cutting out print media considered to be unproductive.

* Reduce what Stewart called unnecessary discretionary store-level markdowns. This is expected to save $11 million, though most of the benefits will flow into 2014, he said.

Bombay, which posted a net loss of $19.9 million and a 3% same-store sales decline in the second quarter ended July 29, launched BombayKids as an online store in August 2001 and opened its fist bricks-and-mortar Kids store the following year in Dallas.

In its most recent annual report, the retailer hinted of some trouble with the concept when it noted plans to reallocate a portion of the square footage in some Kids stores, replacing the merchandise with other goods it believed would be more productive.

*For the latest information on the infant and juvenile industries, see our sister publication Kids Today at www.kidstodayonline.com .