Odimo Has IPO
Rob Bates -- JCK-Jewelers Circular Keystone, 4/1/2005
A second jewelry Web site has gone public. Odimo.com's initial public offering in February raised some $28 million, at $9 a share, down from its initial estimates of over $40 million, at $11 to $13 a share.
The company is partially owned by Israeli sightholder Beny Steinmetz and Jan Bell founder Alan Lipton. It also operates Diamond.com, WorldofWatches.com, and Ashford.com, which itself was once a stand-alone dot-com that went public.
For the first nine months of 2004, the company netted $30.7 million in sales, a 31.2 percent increase from the year before, it says. But the company lost $10.6 million in that period.
Among the more notable aspects of its prospectus was this sentence, under Risks: "We acquire most of the brand-name watches and luxury goods we sell through the parallel market, or gray market as it is also called, which increases the risk that we may inadvertently sell counterfeit or stolen goods or merchandise." This exposes the site to possible litigation, it added.
Odimo's take is significantly less than netted from the IPO of rival jewelry site www.bluenile.com, which raised $76.7 million last May.
