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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.
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+.
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.
“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.”