Walmart buys plus-size store Eloquii

Eloquii is targeted exclusively at plus-size
shoppers.
Facebook/Eloquii

• Walmart
  is acquiring women’s plus-size retailer Eloquii, it announced
  on Tuesday. 
• It did not disclose pricing details, but sources
  familiar with the matter told
  Recode that Walmart will pay $100 million for the
  company.
• Women’s plus-size apparel is a big business. It
  
  generates $21.4 billion of annual sales in the United
  States and is growing faster than the country’s overall apparel
  market, according to the NPD Group. 

Walmart wants in on the plus-size market.

On Tuesday, it announced that it would be acquiring Eloquii, a
women’s fashion brand that is targeted exclusively at
plus-size shoppers. The company was founded in 2011 as part
of The Limited but relaunched online as an independent brand in
2014. Since then, it has opened five stores
across the United States.

Walmart would not disclose pricing details to Business
Insider. However, sources familiar with the matter told

Recode that Walmart will pay $100 million for the
brand, which is nearly three times Eloquii’s annual
revenue.

Women’s plus-size apparel is a big business. It generates

$21.4 billion of annual sales in the US and is growing faster
than the country’s overall apparel market, according to the NPD
Group. Last year it
grew 6%, far outpacing sales of women’s apparel in
general.

Eloquii is considered to be one of the major players in the space
offering and has been doubling its sales every year
since it launched, reaching around $80 million for fiscal 2017,
according to
MarketWatch.

This acquisition is part of Walmart’s strategy to
improve its fashion shopping experience online and in its
stores. 

“While we know we are servicing the customer well on consumables,
we haven’t had that offering on the fashion side, and our
customers are asking for it,” Denise Incandela, Walmart’s head of
online fashion, said in a presentation at the WWD Digital Forum
in New York City in September.

Incandela, who has more than 20 years of experience working
in luxury retail at Saks Fifth Avenue and Ralph Lauren, was hired
by Walmart to grow its fashion business in 2017.

Its big push into apparel comes as its biggest online
competitor, Amazon, is making strides in the space. While Walmart
was the leading US apparel retailer in 2017,

analysts
are expecting it to be unseated by Amazon by
the end of 2018.