The Dallas Morning News

JCPenney was riding high in 1992 when it opened its sprawling new headquarters in Plano. The company announced in 1987 it was moving from New York, and North Texas was happy to claim the iconic national retailer as its own.

But like many businesses, JCPenney was hit hard by changing shopping trends and, then, by the pandemic. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 and vacated its enclave on Legacy Drive. Its new owner even later referred to it as “road kill.”

In 2025, is JCPenney finally rising from the ashes for good? We hope so with the recent news of its merger with the operator of Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer, Nautica and other well-known labels.

JCPenney and Sparc Group will form a new company called Catalyst Brands and will be based in Plano. That’s great news not just for the Legacy area, but also the region. The company’s reoccupation of a portion of its headquarters back in 2023 will hopefully stick this time. We’re rooting for this hometown retailer, popular with the working class and those hoping to stretch a dollar.

“J.C. Penney made it through two world wars, the Depression, the Walmart effect, the Great Recession, the ascent of Amazon, the decline of malls and unprecedented self-inflicted wounds as it tried to reinvent the department store,” longtime Dallas Morning News retail writer Maria Halkias noted in May 2020. “It took a crippling pandemic to get a company that was founded and flourished first in small-town America and then in its suburban malls into bankruptcy court.”

Since that report, the company has struggled to regain its former glory. A couple of big-name chief executive officers, including former Apple retail guru Ron Johnson, have tried to transform the company but have not been successful. Stores have shuttered, some re-opened and sales were up and down.

JCPenney showed a profit in its fiscal 2023, but by the third quarter of 2024, it had slipped back into the red. Now new life, and resources, are being breathed into the company. The new Catalyst Brands has over $9 billion in revenue, 1,800 store locations, 60,000 employees and $1 billion of liquidity.

“The real question is, ‘OK, what are they going to do now?’” Katherine Black, a partner at global strategy and management consulting firm Kearney, told our newsroom colleague Brian Womack.

We hope the answer to that question is “thrive,” and that JCPenney proves that a brand built on offering everyday families everyday value can stand the test of time.