Originally Posted by
Cass62
I also was left with a bad taste in my mouth at the way they shut down the fabric/supplies and literally sold truckloads of fabric for pennies on the dollar to re-sellers, rather than offering these products to their members. To me, that's making a choice to lose both money and customers.
NBC Universal owned and is the entity that sold off Craftsy/Bluprint's assets, so they shut down retail operations in advance of the closure/sale and likely advertised the entire stock of physical goods for surplus auction bid. Same way places like Marden's in Maine and other surplus/salvage retailers get their goods - purchasing large, multi-thousand-dollar lots, at auction. Given NBC was shutting it down (and isn't inherently a retail operation, which takes a lot more in human and logistics resources), they would have had no interest in the retail transactions of selling inventory piecemeal (plus it would likely have made more financial sense to write the surplus off on the balance sheet) and didn't consider members to be their core customer base.
The company that bought the assets of Craftsy/Bluprint, TN Marketing, only bought the course content assets, not the physical or retail ones, since they are an on-demand video company, not a retailer. The press releases related to the purchase stated they had no intention of starting up retail since that's not their line of business.