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A company called Retail Ecommerce Ventures is buying the online assets and IP of Pier 1 Imports, which filed for bankruptcy protection in February, for a cool $31m.
Sooo… who is REV, anyway?
As our own Sam Parr pointed out to our Trends group: Two of the brains behind Retail Ecommerce Ventures are serial entrepreneurs, and one of them’s controversial.
Tai Lopez is an investor and social-media influencer (with 2.9m Instagram followers and 1.3m+ YouTube subscribers). You might know him better as the “here in my garage” advice guy — Vice once called him “the internet’s most hated self-help guru.”
Alex Mehr is a former NASA scientist who sold the online-dating platform Zoosk in a deal valued at $250m+.
REV’s MO?
Take failing retail chains and spin them into ecommerce success stories.
Dressbarn, another troubled chain, went out of business and closed all 544 of its stores last year. A subsidiary of REV bought Dressbarn’s IP and kept the brand alive through an ecommerce business.
Lopez is courting partners on his Instagram account. All you need? $400k.
We asked our Hustle insiders for their takes on REV’s move.
From Joe Speiser, founder of Brax.io:
“I thought the allure of Dressbarn was sifting through the bins to find the hidden gems (hard to do online). Pier 1 was also a very hands-on store, all knick knacks you wouldn’t necessarily specifically look for on your own unless you were in-store. Curious how well this will translate to online-only.”
