Look What I Found Tucked Away in a Cupboard

For those who are incredibly new to the pet industry, and for some who might not even been born when this was a thing, the image above is the Pets.com sock puppet. A friend bought me this as a piece of pet industry memorabilia many years ago only few years after the Pets.com demise.

I called on Pets.com soon after its office in San Francisco was opened, sometime in April 1999. What I remember from the few sales calls I made there between 1999 and 2000 was; that parking was terrible, they were located in a retro-building that I think had been a brewery or sometime in the past and they had NO parking. You had to cruise the neighborhood until you found a pay for parking lot sandwiched between buildings, sometimes as far as 4 or 5 blocks away. The other impression I still have from those meetings, was all the empty computer stations in the office, obviously an infrastructure built for future business… business that never materialized.

Some pundits said that Pets.com failed because of mismanagement, but since all the high profile stand-alone dot.coms didn’t make it in that time period, I have to surmise that it was really a situation of “being before their time” rather than a management issue. Although the money thrown at Pets.com was wildly over the top.

For those who didn’t have any direct business with Pets.com, here is a brief overview of the company and its build-out. It began operations in November 1998 and liquidated in November 2000. Its high-profile marketing campaign gave it a widely recognized public presence, including its 36-foot-tall “falloon” appearance in the 1999 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and an advertisement in the 2000 Super Bowl. The Pets.com Sock Puppet advertising mascot was interviewed by People Magazine and appeared on Good Morning America to name just a couple.

Amazon, and others invested $10.5 million in Pets.com. By October 2000, Amazon had a 30% stake in the company. Pets.com spent most of the venture funding on large warehouses and other shipment infrastructures, as well as purchasing their biggest online competitor at the time, Petstore.com in June 2000 for $10.6 million.

After Pets.com liquidated, Hakan and Associates and Bar None, Inc. purchased the rights to the Sock Puppet for $125,000. Bar None, Inc., an American automotive loan firm, gave the puppet a new slogan: “Everyone deserves a second chance,” and aired nine commercials featuring the puppet in July 2002. After that, the Sock Puppet was heard from no more.

African Northwest in Seattle, according to the owner Tom Parker, they bought something like 80 truckloads of Pets.com inventory at 10-cents on the dollar, causing them have to rent public storage to house the huge inventory as well as the cost of assimilating the inventory. There were unsubstantiated rumors that this purchase was one of the main reasons for ANW’s eventual demise.

As of 2020, the Pets.com domain redirects to Petsmart’s website and I believe Petstore.com is a Marine Depot site.