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Arielle Charnas, a fashion influencer with more than one million Instagram followers, launched her clothing brand Something Navy in 2020 with about $10 million from investors. Now, after unraveling under mounting debt, the company is being sold in a fire sale that underscores the pitfalls of brands centered around online stars, the Wall Street Journal reported. A group of investors across apparel and real estate have agreed to buy the company in an asset and liability purchase, one of the buyers, IHL Group chief executive Sami Souid, said in an interview Tuesday. The investors plan to relaunch the Something Navy brand with Charnas as its creative director. Souid expressed confidence in Something Navy and Charnas. “We believe there’s a lot of opportunity here,” he said. “She’s built a beautiful brand, a beautiful product and she just needs the right manufacturing partner behind her.” Something Navy is offloading $7.5 million in liabilities and $483,000 worth of outstanding bills, according to a term sheet for the acquisition. The term sheet listed the consideration of the purchase at $1.

Creditors of distressed Brazilian retailer Americanas SA approved a restructuring plan to overhaul 50 billion reais ($10.3 billion) of debt in a key step to applying a recovery plan nearly a year after its sudden implosion due to a multi-year fraud, Bloomberg News reported. With more than 97% of banks, bondholders and suppliers represented at the virtual meeting, the creditors gave the company the green light to proceed with the plan that envisions a capital injection of 24 billion reais in 2024 and recovery rates close to 30%. The stock gained as much as 7.8% in Sao Paulo trading to 0.97 reais a share. Brazil’s wealthiest and most iconic businessmen billionaires Jorge Paulo Lemann, Carlos Sicupira and Marcel Telles are the largest shareholders of Americanas and have agreed to inject 12 billion reais into the company as part of the recovery plan. They’ve already put up 1.5 billion reais as part of debtor-in-possession financing and will disburse another 3.5 billion reais shortly after the plan’s approval, chief financial officer Camille Loyo Faria said in the assembly on Tuesday.

Bankrupt pharmacy chain Rite Aid Corp. agreed to begin court-supervised mediation with lower ranking creditors, including groups that blame the company for contributing to America’s opioid addiction crisis, Bloomberg News reported. The company, backed by senior lenders, will negotiate with unsecured creditors about how to end the retailer’s insolvency case and on a potential loan package to fund the company’s exit from bankruptcy, Rite Aid attorney Aparna Yenamandra said in court Tuesday. The company will try reach a deal before the end of January, Yenamandra said. The pharmacy chain held a video court hearing Tuesday to ask US Bankruptcy Judge Michael Kaplan to approve a $3.25 billion loan package to refinance older debt and to help pay for the company’s reorganization case. Kaplan said he will sign an order approving the financing later this week after the company makes adjustments to the wording of the loan proposal documents. Rite Aid is trying to sell itself while under court protection in order to pay creditors owed billions of dollars. Should the company fail to find a buyer willing to keep at least part of the chain open, Rite Aid would be forced to liquidate. When retailers liquidate in bankruptcy, lower-ranking creditors are typically paid far less than if the company successfully reorganizes.

Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust filed for its second bankruptcy in three years, succumbing to the consumer shift away from bricks-and-mortar locations, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The owner of 16 shopping malls, primarily on the East Coast, filed a chapter 11 petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware seeking to implement a restructuring agreement that allows its junior lenders to take control of the company. Under the agreement, junior lenders that are collectively owed more than $700 million will exchange their holdings into a controlling equity interest in the company. Certain of those lenders will provide a new $60 million debtor-in-possession facility to fund the bankruptcy proceedings. Senior lenders owed roughly $400 million will have their claims either repaid in cash or through a new exit loan facility, according to a securities filing. Mario Ventresca, Preit’s chief financial officer, said in a declaration to the court Monday that its previous bankruptcy, filed in 2020, “proved insufficient to address the company’s long-term liquidity needs and persisting macroeconomic challenges.” Ventresca attributed some of the company’s troubles to online shopping and lower consumer spending, due in part to rising inflation and interest rates. Many of Preit’s tenants, including anchors such as JCPenney, commenced their own bankruptcy cases and closed stores at Preit’s properties, he said.

Big companies that had previously pushed through one standard price increase per year are now raising prices more frequently, the New York Times reported. Retailers increasingly use digital price displays, which they can change with the touch of a button. Across the economy, executives trying to maximize profits are effectively running tests to see what prices consumers will bear before they stop buying. Alexander MacKay coleads the Pricing Lab at Harvard Business School, a research center devoted to studying how companies set prices. Since the pandemic, he has watched how businesses have become more willing to experiment with what they charge their customers. Huge disruptions to supply chains pushed up corporate costs during the pandemic and forced many companies to think more creatively about their pricing strategies, Mr. MacKay said. That supercharged a trend toward more rigorous pricing, and showed many companies that they could more boldly play with prices without chasing shoppers away. The experimentation continues even as costs ease. “We may have prices changing more quickly than they have before,” he said. That could mean up or down, though companies are generally more eager to raise prices than cut them. Firms are trying to figure out how to protect the profits they have built since the pandemic. For big companies in the S&P 500 index, the average profit margin — the percentage of profit relative to revenue — soared in late 2020 and into 2021, as government stimulus and the Federal Reserve’s emergency interventions stoked consumer demand. At the same time, companies raised their prices so much that they more than covered higher costs for energy, transportation, labor and other inputs, which have recently started to come down.

Hildred Capital Management is set to buy bankrupt baby brand Hello Bello after nobody bested the healthcare-focused private equity firm’s $65 million opening offer, according to court papers, Bloomberg News reported. Hello Bello, best known for its sustainable diapers, filed for chapter 11 protection less than two months ago. Actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard launched the Los Angeles-based company in 2019 alongside a deal to sell the products exclusively at Walmart Inc., according to a statement at the time. Today, its products are also sold at other retailers and online. Hildred plans to combine Hello Bello with Hyland’s Naturals, another portfolio company that sells supplements and over-the-counter medicine, under one umbrella parent company, according to people with knowledge of the plans. Hildred is set to hold Hello Bello in a newly launched continuation fund expected to close above $650 million.

The National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retail trade group, has revised a report released in April that pulls back the claim that organized retail crime accounts for nearly half of overall industry shrink, which measures overall loss in inventory, including theft, the Associated Press reported. The revision of the group's organized retail crime report on Dec. 1 follows an analysis from Retail Dive that found mistakes in the data. Retail Dive is an online news site that covers retail trends. The trade association released the original report in partnership with K2, a financial crimes risk management firm. The report erroneously stated that of the $94.51 billion in so-called industry shrink, nearly half was to organized retail crime. David Johnston, the national retail group’s vice president of asset protection and retail operations, told The Associated Press in an interview on Thursday that the discrepancy was based on K2 referencing U.S. Senate testimony delivered in 2021 by Ben Dugan, who at the time was the president of a nonpartisan group called the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail, or CLEAR. In testimony, Dugan said that organized retail crime accounted for $45 billion in annual losses for retailers and cited the coalition. The K2 analyst then made an incorrect inference linking the 2022 NRF security survey’s results with the CLEAR figure. Johnston said he hasn't been able to confirm where CLEAR derived the $45 billion amount, but he said that a 2016 security survey by the retail trade group reported $45 billion in overall shrink loss. The revised report also deleted any estimate of organized retail crime's overall impact in dollars and any reference to CLEAR.

More than $1 billion doled out to shareholders in Sycamore Partners’ 2014 buyout of retailer Nine West and other apparel brands owned by Jones Group is legitimate and can’t be unwound, according to an appeals court ruling that gave priority to market stability over creditors seeking to recoup funds in bankruptcy, according to a WSJ Pro Bankruptcy analysis. In a long-awaited 56-page ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last week affirmed the Southern District of New York’s 2020 decision that extended safe harbor protections to payments distributed to shareholders in the deal. Nine West’s bankruptcy trustee has argued that directors, officers and shareholders of the retailer’s former parent company unlawfully profited from the buyout. Junior debtholders said the LBO saddled the company with debt, stripped it of its best assets and led it to bankruptcy. These creditors, who suffered big investment losses after the retailer filed for chapter 11 in 2018, asked the court to deem more than $1.18 billion of payments made to both the shareholders and to former directors and officers in the buyout illegal and that they should be paid back. The court of appeals held that in Nine West’s LBO most of the distributions in question — $1.105 billion paid to shareholders — are protected by the safe harbor and that Nine West was considered a financial institution because it hired a bank agent, Wells Fargo, as the conduit of the transactions. The court said in this case a customer to a financial institution is a financial institution itself. The Nine West trustee hasn’t said whether this ruling will be appealed.

The bankruptcy estate of Bed Bath & Beyond has filed the largest-ever lawsuit with the Federal Maritime Commission, seeking around $300 million from Mediterranean Shipping Co. for allegedly overcharging to move its cargo during the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bankrupt retailer wants Geneva-based MSC, the world’s largest boxship operator in terms of capacity, to pay around $150 million for damages and an equal sum for what it described as exploitative and coercive behavior. Complaints by American companies are handled by the FMC, the U.S. maritime regulator. Bed Bath & Beyond filed for bankruptcy protection in April, after years of losses. It subsequently closed all of its stores and sold its brand to Overstock.com, which has taken on the Bed Bath & Beyond name. The bankrupt estate changed its legal name to DK Butterfly. The 36-page lawsuit said MSC’s performance in 2021 was “abysmal” and details how the retailer had to pay high freight rates in the spot market to get its goods shipped. It also claims that MSC failed to meet its contractual obligations in terms of pricing along with saddling the retailer with surcharges.

Consumers on Cyber Monday spent $12.4 billion online, up 9.6% compared to last year, per Adobe Analytics' data on e-commerce, YahooFinance.com reported. As people looked to cash in last-minute deals between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, $15.7 million was spent every minute. This comes after Black Friday brought in a record-breaking $9.8 billion, up 7.5% compared to a year ago, while the following weekend saw $10.3 billion spent. The total for Cyber Week — the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday — amounted to $38 billion, up 7.8% year over year. Retailers' plans to push harder on discounting may have worked, after consumers buckled down on spending amid rising interest rates, dwindling savings, the return of student loan payments, and credit card debt.