Ex-Apple exec Ron Johnson’s Enjoy Technology files for bankruptcy

Appreciate Technological know-how, a retail startup launched by previous Apple and J.C. Penney exec Ron Johnson, submitted for Chapter 11 personal bankruptcy security on Thursday, mere months just after it designed its stock current market debut.

The company’s liquidity has dwindled though its enterprise has suffered from staffing shortages. Delight in, which operates cellular retail retailers, went community in Oct via a merger with a specific intent acquisition organization, or SPAC.

Delight in stated in a filing that it strategies to provide its property in the United States to the engineering repair service organization Asurion.

Asurion has agreed to provide $55 million of financing so that Appreciate can keep on to operate as it reorganizes in personal bankruptcy safety from collectors, the filing said. Take pleasure in expects Asurion’s bid will be enough to pay out all of its secured and unsecured lenders.

Enjoy and Asurion did not right away reply to requests for comment.

Johnson, who is also CEO of Love, started the business in 2014. He is most effective regarded for serving to to create Apple’s retail organization and for trying to switch all-around the J.C. Penney division retail store chain, albeit unsuccessfully. He was there from 2011 to 2013, a interval in which his approach alienated the retailer’s main shoppers.

Very last yr, amid a frenzy of SPAC specials, Love went public by a merger with the blank test organization Marquee Raine Acquisition Corp. At the time, the transaction valued the blended enterprise at an enterprise worth of around $1.2 billion.

But more just lately, Get pleasure from was damage partly as SPAC buyers started out to choose back their funds and the enterprise was left with much less income, court filings present.

Get pleasure from lists only $523,000 in income on hand. The organization said it has already started laying off about 400 U.K.-based mostly staff, or approximately 18% of its complete workforce.

Appreciate counted enterprise money firms such as Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz as initial backers. The company begun to assess strategic alternate options this previous spring, in accordance to the submitting.

Its shares, which trade beneath 20 cents apiece, are down a lot more than 96% this yr, like Thursday’s losses.