MotherNature.com

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

~ the last words ~

mothernature was US-only at the licensing layer, the supplements regulatory regime for shipping into europe and the middle east in '99 made the catalog impossible to deliver outside the lower forty-eight. in 2000 i was sixteen in ankara, my supplements habit was a multivitamin tablet from a local eczane. the idea of a thirty-thousand-sku vitamins website was not a category turkish e-commerce ran, the local pharmacy chain was where you bought magnesium and the doctor's office was where you bought anything that needed a prescription.

the company went online in 1996 out of concord massachusetts and went public in december '99 at the tail end of the dot-com ipo window, with a site redesign in '98 in between. tom stemberg's venture fund was in the cap table, stemberg had built staples through the eighties and was running the highland consumer fund into specialty e-commerce in the late nineties. the pitch was the everything-store for the gnc shelves. mothernature would list thirty thousand supplement skus with discount pricing and a content layer of health articles to drive search traffic.

the spending side of the story was the loud part. mothernature ran seventeen million dollars in advertising in calendar '99 across television and print media. the q1 2000 quarterly loss was sixteen and a half million dollars on revenue that did not get close to covering it, the accumulated deficit hit eighty-two point eight million by march. the ad spend had bought brand recognition but not contribution margin, the average order was a low-dollar supplement bottle that lost money after shipping.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

look, by mid '00 the company was running through cash at a rate that the public markets were not going to refinance. the stock had fallen below net asset value, which is the polite way of saying the listed shares were worth less than the company's liquid holdings if you liquidated it. the board read that as a signal. they could either spend another six months trying to raise a bridge from the same vcs who had passed on garden.com and living.com that summer, or they could vote the company into dissolution while there was still enough cash on the balance sheet to refund shareholders eighty-five cents per share (roughly).

the board chose the dissolution path. anyway, this was unusual for a dot-com bust death because it preserved some shareholder value, most of the dot-com retail dissolutions in '00 and '01 left the equity holders with zero.

~ the day it died ~

the board's announcement went out on november 7 '00. the press release said mothernature.com would cease accepting new orders by february '01 and refund shareholders the thirteen and a half million in cash on hand. a special shareholder vote was scheduled for november 30 to approve the wind-down formally. anyway, the actual order flow tailed off through january and early february, the site stayed online with a static notice through the spring before the domain itself was sold off.

look, the press in the second week of november covered mothernature as one stop in a five-headline pile-up. [[pets-com]] had announced its closure four days earlier on november 7. [[garden-com]] would announce a week later. [[furniture-com]] had announced the day before. the cnn money rotation that week called it the "dot-com darwinism" run. mothernature was the line item that did not have a sock puppet.

~ what got buried with it ~

the vitamins-and-supplements e-commerce category took until the mid 2010s to come back at scale. vitacost and iherb are the descendants that worked, alongside the amazon vitamins shelf that absorbed the long tail. they came up after the broadband and last-mile cost curves had bent down far enough to make a sub-twenty-dollar supplement order ship at a positive contribution margin. mothernature itself shows up in business school case studies as the example of how to wind down a public company in an orderly way, the corporate governance answer rather than the cautionary tale. the stemberg-era highland consumer fund moved on to other bets, the concord office building was repurposed inside the next quarter.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »