Garden.com Shuts Down

Garden.com on Wednesday said it will begin a phased
shut-down while it pursues the sale of its assets, including remaining
inventory and its URL.

Shares of the Internet-based garden products retailer were down over 35 percent in Wednesday trading. The stock’s all-time high is $15.

The company, founded in December of 1995, said it will conduct “a phased
layoff” of its consumer business employee base and will conduct a “going out
of business” product inventory sale to consumers. NASDAQ halted trading after
the announcement.

Garden.com cut 30 percent of its work force, or about 95 jobs, in late
September in an effort to reduce the burn rate. But it just wasn’t enough.

The dot com said it made “extensive and comprehensive efforts to find
strategic alternatives,” including the sale of the company, to no avail.

“I deeply regret that Garden.com is unable to see through the vision we
started nearly five years ago,” said Cliff Sharples, president and CEO of
Garden.com. “Despite every best effort by the company and its management to
rebuild stockholder value and ensure a future for Garden.com’s consumer
business, all possible avenues have been exhausted and it is clear that the
only course of action available to us is to conduct a staged shut-down of our
retail operations.”

“My co-founders and team continue to believe in the power of the Internet to
fundamentally create unique and distinct value for all consumers,” he
continued in a statement. “I am deeply saddened to see the most talented,
dedicated, hard-working team I have ever had the pleasure to work with be
disbanded.”

The company said it will sell its product inventory, URLs, content, photo
library, its popular online gardening tools such as Landscape Planner and
Plant Finder, as well as other intellectual property.

On Monday the company reported a first quarter net loss of $9.9 million, or
$0.56 per share, compared to a net loss of $5.6 million, or $1.45 per share,
for the same period in the prior year.