Again in 2009 I queried a advertising and marketing contact at Overstock.com about presumably interviewing Patrick Byrne, the CEO. “I’ll ask him,” the contact replied.
An hour or two later, I obtained an e-mail — from Patrick Byrne. He was obtainable.
The dialog and subsequent interview are memorable. He concerned no public relations personnel — uncommon for a publicly traded firm — and required no preparation.
“Ought to I ship my questions upfront?” I requested.
“No,” he stated. “Ask no matter you need.”
We printed the interview in December of that yr. I discovered he held a Stanford PhD and funded the development of faculties worldwide. He shared within the interview useful ecommerce recommendations on vacation promoting and transport and was beneficiant along with his time, totally unpretentious.
None of that squared with the Patrick Byrne years afterward, the one embroiled in nonstop investor lawsuits, who reportedly romanced a Russian spy, and, sure, the person scheming within the Trump Oval Workplace.
Nonetheless, I consider Byrne and the years-ago interview when Overstock makes the information, corresponding to final yr when it bought Mattress Tub & Past, the retail chain, out of chapter.
Byrne had lengthy since left the corporate. His successors evidently sought a post-pandemic reset and paid $21 million for no matter was left of the storied retailer. Thus started a disastrous chain of occasions.
- June 2023: Bought Mattress Tub & Past.
- October 2023: Rebranded “Overstock.com” to “Mattress Tub & Past.” Modified the company title to “Past” and switched from the Nasdaq to the New York Inventory Change with a brand new buying and selling image of “BYON.”
- February 2024: Posted 2023 internet losses of $307.8 million, an organization file, on income of $1.56 billion, a 20% year-over-year decline.
- March 2024: Relaunched Overstock.com.
Q2 2024 Financials
By June 30, Past, Inc. operated two ecommerce websites, BedBathAndBeyond.com (housewares) and Overstock.com (discounted items).
The Q2 monetary statements don’t segregate every website’s efficiency. Mixed, the websites generated roughly $398 million of income for the quarter, a 5.7% decline from the earlier yr, with a internet lack of roughly $43 million, a 42% enchancment from the Q2 2023 lack of $74 million.
Past acquired one other bankrupt model, Zulily, for $4.5 million in money in March. Search for that retailer of girls’s and kids’s attire to relaunch this fall, having ceased operations in December.
Past’s inventory worth on August 22 was $11.02, a five-year low.
