Petopia.com

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

~ the obit ~

petopia was the kind of dot-com that did not reach my screen. it ran in the san francisco bay area on american venture money for sixteen months and most of its press lived in the english-speaking trade papers. in ankara on ttnet dial-up i was not buying cat food online from anyone, and the country was not even a year past being on the same kind of dial-up that ran in the us. petopia's customer was an american with a credit card, a labrador, and a kitchen counter for the ups driver to leave a fifty-pound bag of food on.

the company started in 1998 under the name paw.net, founded by lorne abony and andrew reisman, and renamed itself petopia.com when it launched the actual store in august 1999. petco took twenty percent of the company in july 1999 for sixty-six million dollars, which was the largest single check petopia ever got. by the time of the launch the total raise sat above one hundred million. the playbook was the pets.com playbook with a slightly different cap table. the marketing burn was the pets.com burn.

i learned the petopia story after the fact, the way most non-american readers did, from the dot-com bust retrospectives where it sat in the photo grid next to pets.com and pet store dot com and kozmo and webvan. petopia never reached the cultural penetration of the sock puppet brand, it did not buy a super bowl ad, and the lesson it taught business school students was the same lesson with a quieter logo. the brand died into petco.com in two stages, first the asset sale in december 2000 and then the domain redirect a few months after that.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the petopia pitch was that petco, the brick and mortar chain with eight hundred stores, was an investor and a strategic partner. the company was supposed to use petco for fulfillment and pickup while running a real online catalog on top. for whatever reason that integration never finished. petopia ran its own warehouse on the west coast and covered the shipping costs solo. the petco investment ended up being the exit path more than the strategy.

i basically watched this from a distance, but the pattern repeats across the whole specialty-retail dot-com cluster. you raise a hundred million, you spend forty on a brand, twenty on tv, you discover that a forty-pound bag of dog food has the worst unit economics in retail, and you run out of money before the second christmas. petopia hit that wall on schedule.

~ the cracks ~

the planned hundred million dollar ipo was pulled in mid 2000 once the nasdaq started to drop. petopia filed a notice with the sec saying it had sold almost all of its assets and was no longer doing business. for whatever reason petco was the only buyer who showed up, and the deal closed on december 5 2000 for an amount that has never been published cleanly. the trade press reported it as a fire sale.

~ what got buried with it ~

petco kept the customer list and the warehouse and used the petopia codebase to seed its own e-commerce site, which relaunched as petco.com in late 2001. by then the petopia brand was a redirect. the founders went on to other ventures, lorne abony into gaming and media. for some reason the dot-com bust photo retrospectives almost always pick pets.com as the visual punchline and treat petopia as the supporting character. petopia had more funding, fewer ads, no puppet, and slightly less of a legend.

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