Eddie Lampert

Eddie Lampertis an American investor who was perhaps best known for orchestrating the merger of the American retail giants Sears, Roebuck and Company and Kmart in 2005. He served as chairman of the resulting Sears Holdings until shortly after his hedge fund, ESL Investments, acquired the company in a bankruptcy auction in 2019.

Lampert was 14 years old when his father, an attorney, died. While his mother took a job at Saks Fifth Avenue to support the family, Lampert eagerly learned about the stock market from his grandmother; by the time he was in high school, he had grown familiar with corporate reports and financial theory. He studied economics at Yale University (B.S., 1984), where he was tapped for the elite Skull & Bones society and became a research assistant for Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin. Lampert then joined the arbitrage department at the bank holding company Goldman Sachs, where he worked under Robert E. Rubin, who later became the U.S. treasury secretary. Risk analysis became one of Lampert’s specialties; even as a relatively fresh hire, he reduced his department’s exposure to the stock market when he foresaw overvaluations that led to the market crash in 1987.

In 1988 Lampert opened his own hedge fund, ESL Investments, Inc., which delivered annual returns of about 25 percent for its investors. He gradually gained a reputation for spotting opportunity where others did not; when he began acquiring Kmart stock in 2003, the company was little more than a distressed discount retailer with no means of reclaiming the market share taken by competitors. The same held true for Sears, shares of which Lampert began amassing in 2004.

Skeptics, doubting the success of his plan to merge Kmart and Sears into a super-retailer that could compete against the more stylish Target stores and the low-cost Wal-Mart outlets, questioned whether his strengths as a financial manager included the marketing savvy needed to pull paying customers into aging and inefficient stores. Lampert, however, had successfully increased the profits of other store chains by controlling costs and tightening management. Even if he failed, many stores still held tremendous potential value in the form of real estate on which Kmart and Sears stores were located.

In 2005, when the former competitors officially merged into a single company, Sears Holdings Corp., the new firm ranked as the third largest retailer in the United States. Lampert, who controlled nearly 40 percent of the corporation, served as CEO and chairman, and, soon after Sears Holdings’ stock began trading, it became a favourite among the country’s profit-focused hedge-fund managers. Although the holding company remained prosperous over the following years, sales at Kmart and Sears stores continued to decline, prompting Lampert to launch a major multimedia advertising campaign in 2008. He also oversaw the buyback of stocks, which some insiders claimed weakened Sears Holdings by leaving it low on cash. Under Lampert’s oversight, the corporation subsequently began selling various assets, notably its Craftsman tool brand (2017), and in 2014 it spun off Land’s End, one of Sears Holdings’ profitable retailers, into an independent company. Such moves led to speculation that the corporation was being liquidated before declaring bankruptcy, a charge that Lampert denied. However, in October 2018 Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and Lampert stepped down as CEO, though he continued as chairman. In February 2019 a federal judge approved the sale of the holding company to ESL Investments and implored Lampert to “take action that in fact would be of great meaning” to Sears’s workers and creditors. The following month Lampert left the post of chairman.