Company: TJX
Filing Date: 2025-04-02
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000109198-25-000010
Chunk: 36

Company: TJX COMPANIES INC /DE/
Filing Date: 2025-04-02
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 36
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 differentiate us from traditional retailers. Our overall global buying strategy is to acquire merchandise on an ongoing basis that will enable us to offer a desirable and rapidly changing mix of branded, designer and other quality merchandise in our stores at prices below regular prices for comparable merchandise at full-price retailers, including department, specialty, and major online retailers. We seek out and select merchandise from the broad range of opportunities in the market to achieve this end. Our buying organization, which numbers over 1,300 employees (who we refer to as Associates), has buying offices across the globe and executes this opportunistic buying strategy, buying merchandise from more than 100 countries in a variety of ways, depending on market conditions and other factors.

We take advantage of opportunities to acquire merchandise at substantial discounts that regularly arise from the production and flow of inventory in the apparel and home fashions marketplace. These opportunities include, among others, closeouts from brands, manufacturers and other retailers; special production direct from brands and factories; order cancellations and manufacturer overruns. Our global buying strategies are intentionally flexible to allow us to react to frequently changing opportunities and trends in the market and to adjust how and what we source as well as when we source it. Our goal is to operate with lean inventory levels compared to conventional retailers to give us the flexibility to seek out and to take advantage of these opportunities as they arise, close to the time the merchandise is needed in our stores and online and when we have more visibility into fashion trends and price. In contrast to traditional retailers, which tend to order most of their goods far in advance of the time the product appears on the selling floor, our merchants generally remain in the marketplace for goods throughout the year, frequently looking for opportunities to buy merchandise. We buy much of our merchandise for the current or immediately upcoming selling season. We also buy some merchandise that is available in the market with the intention of storing it for sale, typically in future selling seasons. We generally make these purchases, referred to as packaway, in response to opportunities to buy merchandise that we believe has the right combination of brand, fashion, price and quality to supplement the product we expect to be available to purchase later for those future seasons. 

We also acquire some merchandise that we offer under in-house brands or brands that are licensed to us. We develop some of this merchandise ourselves, which allows us to supplement the depth of, or fill gaps in, our expected merchandise assortment. Collectively, these represent a small percentage of our product/merchandise mix.

6

Manufacturers, retailers