How much was the Silicon Valley bubble responsible for the companies that failed the hardest at the turn of the 21st century?
That’s a question that’s been debated heavily for years, particularly in regards to a certain company, featuring a sock-puppet mascot, that came and went in less than three years. Here’s the story of Pets.com, the company that was left eating its own dog food after the money ran out.
The company spent $17 million on advertising in the second quarter of 2000, according to MarketWatch—its first full quarter on the stock market.
When online pet stores, such as Chewy, come to life, it’s inevitable that they’re going to get compared to Pets.com. Because it seems like, on a surface level, the company with the best possible domain name for such a service already proved that the idea doesn’t work.
Some of those involved in the failure struggled with the negative mark left in the public sphere. Wainwright, for one, laid low for a while. But not anymore. In recent years, she’s bounced back in a major way with The RealReal, an online consignment shop that is actually generating the kind of revenue and venture capital that Pets.com struggled with during its demise.
Read MoreIf they had made room for failure, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten an entertaining sock puppet out of the deal. But Pets.com is too good a domain name to be relegated to use as a forwarding domain for PetSmart...
