Blyth Buys Walter Drake

Home decor and home fragrance manufacturer Blyth on Jan. 29 announced it had acquired $80 million low-end housewares cataloger Walter Drake for $53 million. This is Greenwich, CT-based Blyth’s second catalog acquisition in less than a year; it had bought Drake competitor Miles Kimball last April.

Blyth doesn’t plan to merge the titles, however, in part because Miles Kimball, which sells greeting cards and gifts as well as housewares, is a more seasonal business than Walter Drake. But Walter Drake and its companion title, The Home Marketplace, will become a division of Miles Kimball, and Blyth will integrate nearly all of Drake’s fulfillment, warehousing, personalization services, database management, and administration into Kimball’s Oshkosh, WI, and Las Vegas facilities during the next few months.

As a result, Blyth will lay off up to 300 of Drake’s 325 employees. The remaining employees will remain in Drake’s Colorado Springs, CO, merchandising and marketing headquarters. Blyth spokesperson Tyler Schuessler would not comment on the future of Drake president Jon Medved, who didn’t return calls at press time. Both catalog businesses, which total $200 million in annual sales, will be run by Miles Kimball president/CEO Mike Muoio, who is also operational president of Blyth’s catalog and Internet distribution channels.

Blyth is a $1.5 billion manufacturer/marketer of candles and home fragrance products, half of which are sold through exclusively Tupperware-type direct sales parties. The company’s nonexclusive home and garden decor and gift products are sold through its Midwest wholesale distribution division; some of those items appear in the Miles Kimball and Walter Drake catalogs. Schuessler says that expanding its distribution in the catalogs “is clearly an opportunity” Blyth will pursue.

Blyth also has the opportunity to combine the databases of the two catalogs, since both serve primarily women ages 55-65 with an average household income of $40,000 and up. Nevertheless, says Schuessler, the two books’ actual customer lists don’t have that much overlap.