Ron Johnson throughout a panel dialogue on the CNBC Evolve New York occasion on June 19, 2019.
Astrid Stawiarz | CNBC
Enjoy Technology, a retail startup based by former Apple and J.C. Penney exec Ron Johnson, filed for Chapter 11 chapter safety on Thursday, mere months after it made its inventory market debut.
The firm’s liquidity has dwindled whereas its enterprise has suffered from staffing shortages. Enjoy, which operates cellular retail shops, went public in October by way of a merger with a particular function acquisition firm, or SPAC.
Enjoy mentioned in a submitting that it plans to promote its belongings within the United States to the expertise restore firm Asurion.
Asurion has agreed to offer $55 million of financing in order that Enjoy can proceed to function because it reorganizes in chapter safety from collectors, the submitting mentioned. Enjoy expects Asurion’s bid shall be enough to pay all of its secured and unsecured collectors.
Enjoy and Asurion did not instantly reply to requests for remark.
Johnson, who can also be CEO of Enjoy, based the corporate in 2014. He is finest identified for serving to to create Apple’s retail enterprise and for attempting to show across the J.C. Penney division retailer chain, albeit unsuccessfully. He was there from 2011 to 2013, a interval through which his technique alienated the retailer’s core prospects.
Last 12 months, amid a frenzy of SPAC offers, Enjoy went public by way of a merger with the clean examine firm Marquee Raine Acquisition Corp. At the time, the transaction valued the mixed enterprise at an enterprise worth of roughly $1.2 billion.
But extra not too long ago, Enjoy was harm partly as SPAC traders began to take again their cash and the enterprise was left with much less money, court docket filings present.
Enjoy lists solely $523,000 in money available. The firm mentioned it has already begun shedding about 400 U.Ok.-based workers, or roughly 18% of its complete workforce.
Enjoy counted enterprise capital companies together with Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz as preliminary backers. The enterprise began to guage strategic alternate options this previous spring, in line with the submitting.
Its shares, which commerce beneath 20 cents apiece, are down greater than 96% this 12 months, together with Thursday’s losses.