Ron Johnson all the way through a panel dialogue on the CNBC Evolve New York match on June 19, 2019.
Astrid Stawiarz | CNBC
Experience Era, a retail startup based by way of former Apple and J.C. Penney exec Ron Johnson, filed for Bankruptcy 11 chapter coverage on Thursday, mere months after it made its inventory marketplace debut.
The corporate’s liquidity has dwindled whilst its trade has suffered from staffing shortages. Experience, which operates cellular retail retail outlets, went public in October thru a merger with a special-purpose acquisition corporate, or SPAC.
Experience mentioned in a submitting that it plans to promote its belongings in the US to the generation restore corporate Asurion.
Asurion has agreed to supply $55 million of financing in order that Experience can proceed to perform because it reorganizes in chapter coverage from collectors, the submitting mentioned. Experience expects Asurion’s bid might be enough to pay all of its secured and unsecured collectors.
Experience and Asurion did not straight away reply to requests for remark.
Johnson, who could also be CEO of Experience, based the corporate in 2014. He’s perfect recognized for serving to to create Apple’s retail trade and for seeking to flip across the J.C. Penney division retailer chain, albeit unsuccessfully. He was once there from 2011 to 2013, a duration through which his technique alienated the store’s core shoppers.
Remaining 12 months, amid a frenzy of SPAC offers, Experience went public thru a merger with the black-check corporate Marquee Raine Acquisition Corp. On the time, the transaction valued the mixed trade at an undertaking worth of kind of $1.2 billion.
However extra just lately, Experience was once harm phase as SPAC traders began to take again their cash and the trade was once left with much less money, courtroom filings display.
Experience lists best $523,000 in money readily available. The corporate mentioned it has already begun shedding about 400 U.Okay.-based workers, or kind of 18% of its overall body of workers.
Experience counted venture-capital corporations together with Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz as preliminary backers. This previous spring was once when the trade began to guage strategic choices.
Its stocks, which business beneath 20 cents apiece, are down greater than 96% this 12 months, together with Thursday’s losses.