Ecomom
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Ecomom was an e-commerce company selling environmentally safe and healthy products for mothers and children. The brand was founded in 2006 by Kimberly Pinkson — combining the EcoMom Alliance non-profit education arm with an e-commerce startup co-founded by Jenny Orser and Chris de Tournay Birkhan — and was later acquired by Jody Sherman, who moved the headquarters from California to Las Vegas. It raised more than $12 million in funding and exceeded $1 million in sales by 2011.
02 / Ecomom FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Ecomom's core problem was a broken unit-economics engine. According to the company's controller Philip Prentiss's post-mortem, heavy discounting — including 50% discounts on daily-deal sites like Groupon that could not be limited to one per customer — left the company with a negative 48% contribution margin: the average $60 order cost $89 to fulfill, losing $29 on every sale, so more revenue meant more losses. Management turmoil compounded the damage: after Jody Sherman acquired the company, founder Kimberly Pinkson was forced out amid disagreements, and Prentiss described Sherman as a CEO who did not understand margin. By late 2012 the company was burning through its August raise — losing $1.1 million after variable cost in five months with less than $1 million left in the bank — and shut its doors in February 2013. Sherman died by suicide shortly after the shutdown.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Ecomom was founded.
- Operations ended
Ecomom ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Ecomom shut its doors in February 2013 after raising more than $12 million in funding.
- 02
In April 2013, GreenCupboards — a Spokane e-commerce startup that renamed itself Etailz — acquired Ecomom's assets, including its domain and customer list, for an undisclosed sum.
- 03
Etailz planned to relaunch the Ecomom website later in 2013, and the site reopened in the early summer of 2013.