Garden.com Sells Assets to Walmart.com, Burpee
by January 19, 2001 4:15 pm 118 views
Garden.com Inc., an online gardening products retailer, on Wednesday announced that it had sold its Web page content assets to Walmart.com and its brand assets to Burpee Holding Co., the parent company of W. Atlee Burpee & Co.
Garden.com said it received $4.425 million for the assets.
Cynthia Lin, a spokeswoman for Walmart.com in Brisbane, Calif., said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. wouldn’t disclose how much it paid for the Web content, which consists of editorial, interactive and video content, but no inventory.
Lin said Walmart.com would “evaluate, study and determine” how to integrate Garden.com into its Web site before the end of the year.
On Nov. 15, after failing to secure financing to fund operations or to find a buyer, Garden.com said it would shut down and sell its consumer business assets. The 5-year-old company had revenue of $2.6 million and a $9.9 million loss when it announced its earnings figures for the first quarter of the fiscal year on Nov. 13.
The online company wasn’t making much of a dent in the nation’s $70 billion annual home gardening market.
“Turns out that shipping pounds and pounds of dirt is not really all that cost-effective,” Forbes.com said of the Nov. 15 announcement.
Garden.com, of Austin, Texas, announced a restructuring on Sept. 28 and laid off 30 percent of its staff at that time.
Forbes.com said Garden.com made an enormous investment in its Trellis technology. The company developed the “back-end system” to coordinate a single customer shipment filled with products that came from several suppliers.
Walmart.com is a joint venture of Wal-Mart and Accel Partners, a venture capital company. Wal-Mart is the majority owner of the independent company.
Burpee bought Garden.com‘s brand assets, including the company’s URL and certain assets relating to customer information.
Garden.com estimates that it will distribute 10-25 cents per share to its stockholders if the sales go through according to plan.