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Party City Stores to Close by February, Company Says
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In an internal letter, the company said inflation and changes in consumer
spending had forced it to shut its more than 700 stores.
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And as social networks expanded beyond Facebook, Vitrue followed them. Companies can now use its products to manage their campaigns on Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
ReplyDeleteThe change from marketing on corporate websites to social networks was neither fast, nor easy. The company, which “replaced the entire management team essentially,” wasn’t so quick to scrap its early products. But as it moved to offer more apps for community platforms, over about two years, its original business became “noncore,” as they gradually pulled out of contracts, said Bradford.
Making those changes was “scary,” said Bradford, especially in 2008, when the global recession was deepening and when angel investor Ron Conway and Sequoia Capital warned tech companies to raise funding by lowering costs. And the freedom his major investor, General Catalyst Partners, had given him was a double-edged sword. Without it, he wouldn’t be able to make the changes needed to make Vitrue a success. But with it he shouldered the bulk of the responsibility for figuring out how to turn the company around. “That’s pretty damn intimidating and especially when times are rough,” he said.
But it paid off. Vitrue now has around 500 clients, including Procter and Gamble’s Tide Laundry Detergent and chip-maker Intel. Revenue has been more than doubling annually, though Bradford declined to specify the overall figure. And, in May, Bradford, who was chief marketing officer of WebMD when in merged with Healtheon in a deal worth around $4 billion and CEO of N2 Broadband when it was purchased by Tanberg Television for about $120 million, engineered his third successful exit. Oracle bought Vitrue. Asked about the sales price Bradford would say only that it had been “speculated all over the web, so you could quickly Google it.” Tech sites estimated the deal at $300 million. Bradford would not confirm that the figure was accurate.
Bradford said the willingness to change course has been critical to his company’s success. “We’re reinventing ourselves every six months,” said Bradford, now Senior Vice President of product development at Oracle. “Frankly, if I had stayed with the business model we started with at Vitrue we’d been out of business.”
Simone Baribeau is a freelance writer based in Miami, Florida. She has written for Bloomberg News, the Financial Times and the business sections of the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor. Email her at simonebaribeau@gmail.com.