Who Owns Kohl's?

The Kohl's brand began with Maxwell Kohl, a Polish immigrant who opened a small grocery store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1927. He built that store into a regional chain called Kohl's Food Stores, and in September 1962 he opened the first Kohl's Department Store in Brookfield, Wisconsin. The concept sat deliberately between upscale department stores and discount chains, a niche the company still occupies.

In 1972 the British American Tobacco Company's American retail arm, BATUS Inc., acquired Kohl's. At the time the business operated a handful of department stores alongside the grocery chain, which was later sold to A&P in 1983. BATUS expanded the department store format through the Midwest during the late 1970s and 1980s.

A management-led investor group bought the company from BATUS in 1986. Kohl's went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1992 with roughly 80 stores. The following decade turned a regional Midwest retailer into a national chain. Kohl's entered the mid-Atlantic states in 1997, moved into the Northeast and Texas by 1999, and arrived in California in 2003 with an opening of roughly 28 stores in a single day. By 2012 the chain operated more than 1,100 locations, giving it the largest store count of any American department store.

Private label development ran alongside the geographic growth. Kohl's built proprietary brands such as Sonoma, Croft & Barrow, Apt. 9, and Tek Gear, and added exclusive celebrity lines including LC Lauren Conrad in 2009 and Simply Vera Vera Wang in 2007. The Sonoma line was consolidated and relaunched as Sonoma Goods for Life in 2016.

Partnership strategy defined the 2017 to 2021 period. Kohl's began accepting Amazon returns at its stores in a 2017 pilot and rolled the service chainwide in 2019, betting that foot traffic was worth more than channel conflict. In December 2020 the company announced a partnership with Sephora, the beauty retailer owned by LVMH, to replace JCPenney as Sephora's department store partner. The first Sephora at Kohl's shops opened in August 2021, and the format reached more than 1,100 stores by 2026.

The early 2020s brought pressure. Activist investor Macellum Capital Management pushed Kohl's to pursue a sale in 2021 and 2022, and the company evaluated multiple takeover approaches, including a proposal from Franchise Group, before talks ended in mid-2022. Sales then declined for an extended stretch, with comparable sales falling for 18 consecutive quarters through mid-2026. Chief executive Tom Kingsbury stepped down in January 2025. His replacement, Ashley Buchanan, was fired within months after an internal investigation found he had directed business to a vendor tied to an undisclosed personal relationship. Board chair Michael Bender took over as CEO and launched a turnaround plan built on proprietary brands, cleaner inventory, and sharper value messaging.

By the second quarter of fiscal 2026 the plan showed early results: comparable sales fell less than 1 percent, the best performance in more than four years, gross margin expanded to 43 percent, and proprietary brand comparable sales turned positive. Kohl's also expanded Babies R Us shop-in-shops to roughly 250 stores and reinstated share repurchases in 2026.