Burlington

Behind only TJX and Ross Stores, Burlington ranks third among US off-price retailers by revenue, trading on the New York Stock Exchange under BURL from its headquarters in Burlington, New Jersey. The company reported net sales of approximately $10.6 billion in fiscal year 2024, operating more than 1,100 stores across 46 states and Puerto Rico. CEO Michael O’Sullivan, who joined from Ross Stores in 2019, has led the strategic turnaround that reframed the business from a coat-led legacy chain into a broad-assortment off-price competitor.

The name shortening from Burlington Coat Factory to Burlington in 2020 marked the formal end of a positioning the company had been moving away from for years. Founded in 1972 as a single outerwear outlet in Burlington, New Jersey, the chain built its early identity around coats and remained dependent on cold-weather seasonality long after it had expanded into a full off-price department-store assortment. Coats now account for under 10% of sales, with the merchandise mix spanning women’s, men’s, and children’s apparel, baby products through the Baby Depot department, home goods, beauty, accessories, and footwear. The off-price model buys opportunistically from brand overstock, canceled orders, and closeouts, presenting national brands below department-store and specialty-store levels. The 2020s repositioning under O’Sullivan shrank the average store footprint from the warehouse-scale boxes of the coat-factory era toward smaller, more productive formats, improving inventory turns and lowering occupancy cost per location.

Burlington’s real estate strategy concentrates in value-retail formats where off-price co-tenancy clusters: super-regional outlet and value megamalls, power centers, and high-traffic regional centers. Within the Malls.com network, the brand holds positions at Sawgrass Mills, Ontario Mills, Concord Mills, Arundel Mills, Great Lakes Crossing, Gurnee Mills, Sugarloaf Mills, and The Mills at Jersey Gardens, alongside dense regional placements at Palisades Center, Destiny USA, Green Acres Mall, St. Johns Town Center, and Plaza Las Americas in San Juan. The smaller-format strategy widens the range of centers Burlington can enter, since the reduced footprint fits inline positions and junior-anchor boxes that the original coat-factory format was too large to occupy.

As a value-anchor draw, Burlington brings national off-price traffic into power centers and value malls, occupying 25,000 to 50,000 square feet depending on format generation. The brand co-locates naturally with Ross, T.J.Maxx, Marshalls, and Five Below in the off-price cluster that anchors the value-retail co-tenancy model, and its continued unit-growth program, guided toward a long-term target above 2,000 stores, makes it one of the more active anchor-and-junior-box tenants in the US market for operators backfilling vacated department-store space or building value-oriented centers. The shift to smaller formats has made Burlington a more flexible counterparty than it was in the coat-factory era, when its space requirements limited it to large-format big-box positions.