Furniture.com Discontinues Operations

Furniture World Magazine

Furniture.com, Inc., the leading online retailer of furniture and home furnishings, today discontinued operations and laid off 76 of its 88 employees, citing difficulty securing sufficient capital to fund operations going forward. The 12 remaining employees will ensure the professional management of matters relating to the closure, including the review of available options for sale of the company's assets. Severance was provided to laid off employees. Furniture.com has taken steps to protect customers with undelivered orders. Since late May, Furniture.com has placed customer deposits and payments into an escrow account in order to safeguard availability of the funds for refund. Eligible customers who have not otherwise received refunds will be contacted by the escrow agent within approximately 60 days with instructions on how to submit refund claims. Furniture.com dominated the home furnishings e-tailing category since it launched in January 1999. The company reported $22 million in net revenues for the nine months ending September 2000, more than twice its net revenues for all of 1999. In September, the Furniture.com website attracted roughly one million unique users a month, ranking it as one of the most popular Home and Food sites on the Internet.