Supply Chain & Merchandising

BJ’s Wholesale Club is outsourcing and expanding its product demonstration program with the help of Crossmark’s PromoWorks division.

Plans call for PromoWorks to manage, enhance and ultimately expand the company’s demo and events program. BJ’s current demo and events staff, made up of approximately 1,400 employees, will be given priority to apply for the demo program with PromoWorks, which plans to grow the current program by more than 25% or about 500 jobs, the companies said it a joint statement.

Tejon Ranch, Calif. — Pottery Barn plans to open a new outlet store at The Outlets at Tejon. At 12,397-sq. ft., it will be the retailer’s ninth outlet store in the U.S. and its only current outlet store in California.

Currently under construction and slated to open in August 2014, The Outlets at Tejon is located on Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, Calif.

Kimberly-Clark North America has named Grant LaMontagne as president of customer development. In his new role, LaMontagne will lead all sales and customer development activities for the company’s operations in North America and will report to KCNA group president Michael Hsu.

LaMontagne joins KCNA from Clorox, where he was most recently SVP and GM for Clorox Professional Products business, which includes the health care, janitorial/sanitary and institutional foods channels.

New York -- Revionics, a provider of end-to-end merchandise optimization solutions, appointed the company’s president and CEO Marc Hafner as chairman of the board.

Hafner has served as president and CEO since 2010 and with this newly added role he will lead the company’s strategic planning and accelerate its global growth.

Cal-Maine Foods has reached an agreement to acquire the remaining 50% of the membership interests of Delta Egg Farm from Sunbest Foods of Iowa, a Moark affiliate, for $17 million. The company already owns 50% of Delta Egg Farm.

Delta Egg Farm owns and operates a feed mill and egg production complex with capacity for approximately 1.2 million laying hens, located near Delta, Utah, and an organic egg production complex with capacity for approximately 400,000 laying hens located near Chase, Kansas. The company expects to close the transaction March 1.

Plano, Texas -- J.C. Penney Company has named Ed Record as CFO, effective March 24. He will also serve as executive VP. Record, 45, comes to Penney from regional department store chain Stage Stores, where he most recently served as COO and, before that, as CFO.

Record will succeed Ken Hannah, who was hired in May 2012 under former CEO Ron Johnson.

Richard N. Cabela, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the $3.6 billion chain of 50 Cabela’s stores, has died at his home in Sidney, Neb.

Cabela served as chairman of the board until June 2013, when he transitioned to chairman emeritus and Jim Cabela became chairman. Cabela and his wife, Mary, and brother, Jim, founded Cabela’s in 1961. He is survived by his wife, Mary, and their nine children and their families, as well as two sisters and three brothers.

While we’re only just getting started on 2014, already one of the big retail stories is store closings. While the economy is far from robust, we aren’t in a recession either, and so at first these closings might seem a little surprising. I don’t see it that way, however: The recent spate of planned store closing for 2014 is exactly what we should expect from an industry in transition. It’s not a crisis, so much as it is a realignment.