Garden.com

» see garden.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 1995 i was eleven, in ankara, the first dial-up modem in our house was still three years off. garden.com was a US dot-com from austin texas, the kind of english-language e-commerce that did not reach the turkish web at any meaningful scale. i learned the name from the dot-com bust retrospectives years later, the company never advertised in a place i would have read. the idea of buying mulch and bulbs from a website was not on the table in the turkish market in any case.

the company was founded in october '95 by cliff sharples and his wife lisa together with their wharton classmate jamie o'neill. they were three business school grads with a pitch deck for the everything-store version of plants and gardening tools. austin texas as the headquarters, a network of regional nurseries as the fulfillment backbone, the website as the front door. by '96 they were taking orders. by '99 they were the canonical sub-vertical play for online retail, the niche-category-specialist that vcs liked because it was more focused than amazon.

the company raised about a hundred and five million dollars across private and public rounds. the september '99 ipo raised forty-nine point two million on top of the venture money already committed. the stock priced at twelve and doubled on day one. by year-end '99 it had touched fifteen dollars. the management team had done what investors asked them to do, every quarterly target made or beaten, the story was the picture-perfect dot-com debut.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the press in '99 was warm. the texas monthly profile of the sharples called them austin's golden couple. anyway, the company had built a real fulfillment network with regional nursery partners, the seasonal cycle of gardening had been mapped into the order flow, the brand had recognition that ranked above most of the niche dot-com vertical plays. they were doing the thing right. the numbers were trending toward profitability on the timeline the s-1 had promised.

the trouble was that "trending toward profitability" stopped being a story the public markets would buy by march '00. the nasdaq peaked in march, by june nobody was writing checks to dot-com retailers that still needed another round to clear the breakeven line. garden.com had hit its targets. it still needed money. those two facts had been on the same side of the ledger for five years and were now on opposite sides (roughly).

~ the decline ~

the sharples started shopping for a bridge round in mid '00. nothing closed. they tried to find a strategic acquirer in the home and garden retail category. nothing closed. the company filed a quarterly loss and saw the stock break a dollar by late summer. trading was halted in october. by november the board had voted to wind down operations and sell the consumer business assets to anyone who would take them.

~ the day it died ~

the press release went out november 15 '00. one hundred and fifty-three employees were told the layoff would happen in phases over the next quarter. the inventory was put up for sale. the urls and the photo library and the gardening content were packaged into a sale lot. the company joined [[pets-com]] and [[living-com]] and [[homegrocer-com]] in the same austin-to-seattle-to-boston dot-com graveyard that opened in '00 and stayed open until '02. look, the texas monthly follow-up piece called it "wilted." that was the headline that stuck.

~ what got buried with it ~

garden.com is the quieter member of the bust cohort, it never had a sock puppet or a super bowl ad. it had a competent founding team and a vertical with real demand. it just hit the wrong twelve months on the calendar for needing capital. the regional nursery partnership model was good. it would not come back as e-commerce for another decade, the version of garden.com that actually worked landed as bonnie plants direct shipments and the home depot online catalog. the brand survived as a domain redirect for years after the company itself had stopped existing.

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