TJX Companies - History

History

Stanley Feldberg was one of the 1956 founders of Zayre Corp. He served as president of the company until 1978, and afterwards remained on the Board of Directors, until he retired in 1989. Once the company had sold off the "Zayre" name, the company consisted of its one core remaining store brand, T.J. Maxx. The next year, in 1990, TJX expanded into an additional store brand division, and at the same time it first went international, as it entered the Canadian market by acquiring the five-store Winners chain. Two years later, it launched its third brand, HomeGoods, in the United States. TJX's expansion beyond North America came in 1994, when the fourth brand division, T.K. Maxx, was founded in the United Kingdom, and then expanded into Ireland.

In 1995, TJX doubled in size when it acquired Marshalls, its fifth brand. T.J. Maxx and Marshalls later became consolidated as two brands under a single division, The Marmaxx Group. The following year, TJX Companies Inc. was added to the Standard & Poor's S&P 500 Composite Index, which consists of 500 of the largest companies in the United States.

TJX launched a sixth brand, A.J. Wright, in 1998 in the eastern U.S. The brand went national in 2004 when it opened its first stores in California on the west coast. The company's seventh brand division, HomeSense, formed in 2001, was a Canadian brand modeled after the existing US brand, HomeGoods.

In 2002, TJX revenue reached almost $12 billion. In mid 2003, TJX acquired an eighth brand division, Bob's Stores, concentrated in New England. In Canada, TJX began to configure some Winners and HomeSense stores side-by-side as superstores. The superstores feature open passageways between them, with dual branding. TJX's revenue in 2003 reached over $13 billion. TJX began to test the side-by-side superstore model in the United States in 2004, combining some of each of the two Marmaxx brand stores with HomeGoods. The company reached 141st position in the 2004 Fortune 500 rankings, with almost $15 billion in revenue. That year was also marked by the death of retired Zayre founder Stanley Feldberg.

In April 2008, TJX launched the HomeSense brand in the UK, with six stores opening throughout May. The brand is more upmarket than its Canadian namesake. Later that year, in August, TJX sold Bob's Stores to Versa Capital Management and Crystal Capital.

In December 2010, TJX announced that the A.J. Wright stores would be closed, cutting about 4,400 jobs, and that more than half of them would reopen under other company brands.