This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.
What goes up, must come down. It was a cute ad. Who knew it would turn out to be so prophetic?
Pets.com will go down in history as a textbook example of dot-com flame-out, going from IPO to liquidation in nine short months.
Founded in 1998, the company, which had the bright idea of selling pet food and supplies to the public via the internet, went public in February 2000 and raised $82.5 million.
The pet supplies e-tailer was the second Amazon.com-affiliated company to go public after an investment by the e-commerce giant, according to press accounts at the time. Online pharmacy and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) affiliate Drugstore.com, launched in 1997, raised $90 million in an IPO in July of 2000 and saw its shares more than double on its first day of trading.
But Pets.com entered an already crowded field of online pet stores (PetSmart.com and PetStore.com were also up and running, among several others), and investors were starting to ask ugly questions such as, "How are you making money?" that they weren't asking in the late 1990s, when "irrational exuberance" ruled the day. The stock was ultimately a flop, with the price briefly hitting $14 a share before falling back to its opening price of $11.
By November of 2000, however, things had gone barking up the entirely wrong tree, and Pets.com filed for bankruptcy protection. Rival PetSmart.com acquired some of the company's assets, as well as its domain name.
In the end, the best thing about the company was its wildly popular sock puppet mascot. According to its Wikipedia entry, after the company closed, Hakan and Associates and Bar None Inc. purchased the rights to the sock puppet mascot under a joint venture called Sock Puppet LLC.
Drugstore.com (NASDAQ: DSCM) is still in operation.
Let us know in the comments what you miss about Pets.com. And be sure to check out other Companies That Have Vanished.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-08-2008 @ 5:08PM
william lindblad said...
I see that companies that vanished has many bloggers, so I assume this is a group effort. So I pose two questions.
1. who is the oldest to vanish? Clue: they opened their business in 1811 and just went under recently (within the last two years)
2. who is the oldest company in the U.S.? Clue: they are still in business. You have to be a revolutionary to believe it
Answers:
1. Pfaltzgraff Pottery, York Pa. est. 1811
2. Ames. They made shovels for George Washington and you can still buy them at ACE hardware. When Ames made the first ones he was committing treason against Geo. III and could have been hung. (Another reason to revolt)