They never had that much money, but no manufacturer of food or cosmetic products anywhere is even going to pick up the phone if you don't intend to buy an extremely significant amount of product from them. If you intend to demand recipe/formulation changes as well, then they want even more.
The office was honestly a cramped, sweltering sty and not at all showy.
Brandless' real mission was virtue signaling. A lot of good people put a lot of good work into doing the right thing, but ultimately, no one in leadership was actually as interested in bringing affordable organic products to lower income families as they were in being publicly seen pretending to bring affordable organic products to lower income families. Loads of talk about "building a community" with no idea what a community actually was aside from "gated."
Leadership constantly lied about the financial situation being wonderful and focused primarily on sending tens of thousands of dollars worth of free product to D-list Instagram influencers that only affluent, unemployed Marin stepmoms paid any attention to. As such, the typical customer ordered one bottle of coconut oil and filed 32 customer service tickets complaining about the box it came in. It doesn't take a genius to see how that's going to pan out but the ubiquitous narcissistic marketing bros were able to con their way through hiring more and more of their friends to come up with brilliant ideas like "Groupon" in spite of the fact that their numbers were consistently pathetic and they were generating more HR complaints than sales.
SoftBank installed a new CEO and his plan to increase AOV was literally snake oil. He lasted a couple months. Nobody on the ground knew if he left voluntarily or not. My guess is "not." After that they started hawking Alibaba blenders you can buy with a different logo on them for $40 and I have no idea why it took this long for them to pull the plug. I do think they deserve some credit for not actually giving them all of the money at once, though.
The day they shut down somebody did something stupid with the old payroll system and it sent additional copies of 2018 W2s to the IRS with bogus numbers on them. Folks are now receiving threatening letters from the government demanding payment for tens of thousands of dollars of unreported, nonexistent income and there's nobody left who knows how to do anything about it. A tire fire to the bitter, bitter end.
The office was honestly a cramped, sweltering sty and not at all showy.