Wal-Mart Buys Garden.com Contents
by February 5, 2001 12:00 am 80 views
Garden.com Inc., an online gardening products retailer, on Jan. 24 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 consisted of editorial, interactive and film content but no inventory.
Lin said Walmart.com would “evaluate, study and determine” how to integrate Garden.com into its Web site, www.walmart.com, 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 net loss when on Nov. 13 it announced its earnings figures for the first quarter of the fiscal year.
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.