Yet Another Dot Com Who Made It Through

from the more-and-more-like-this... dept

There have been more and more stories lately about dot com companies that have "weathered the storm" and are now starting to grow again. All of these stories seem to have the same theme. The company raised lots of money (and brought along some useless hype) during the boom years, spent most of that money with little to show for it, slammed on the breaks, fired lots of people, renegotiated their lease, and tried to salvage what they had. Plenty of those companies went out of business, but some seem to have made it through. This article focuses on Branders.com, which is a company I remember from the boom years. They made it easy to buy promotional junk (useless gadgets with your company logo on it) over the web. Despite the gadgets being useless, the service, itself, is pretty valuable for companies that need that sort of thing. A few months back, a friend was asking how she could get folders with company's logo on them, and I had rediscovered Branders.com, assuming that they had gone out of business. I do still wonder, though, if it's the type of business that needed to be venture funded, and I'd bet that the money they've raised recently wiped out earlier rounds of capital.