GIFTWORLD.COM HIRES OZER GROUP TO FIND BUYER FOR COMPANY

NEEDHAM, Mass. - The dot-com shakeout of the past few months has now hit a major pure-play gift e-tailer. Giftworld.com has hired The Ozer Group, a retail consulting, business-evaluation and asset-disposition firm, to facilitate the sale of the online gift-services company.

Ozer will look for one or multiple investors to buy Giftworld or to purchase the assets of the e-tailer in smaller blocks. The company's assets include valuable e-commerce technology infrastructure and intellectual property, brandable URLs such as giftworld.com, iforgot.com, iregister.com and iremind.com, software licenses, 1-800 numbers, WAP access codes and exclusive gift-supplier agreements.

Giftworld.com was founded in July 1999. E-consumer analyst Gomez Advisors has rated its site No. 3 out of 17 companies in the Gift category. Its business-to-business (B-to-B) and consumer e-gift solutions offer hundreds of leading brands and a wide selection of gift-packaged products and services to customers.

The company also has a full suite of gift reminder and registry services, and the site currently offers more than 1,500 gifts, making it the one of the largest gift collections on the Internet. Giftworld also offers same-day delivery in 12 major cities, including Boston, Chicago, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The company has numerous promotional partnerships, including a strategic alliance with CNN, and more than 1,500 affiliates and partners.

"Despite its success, however, Giftworld is part of the rising tide of e-tailers that have been squeezed by the sudden decrease in available financing while they work toward profitability," said Mark Stein, president of The Ozer Group. "These e-tailers provide an exceptional opportunity for existing companies to expand their Internet offerings or for companies to initiate an Internet presence."

There has already been interest expressed by a few major portals and one of the leading current Internet gift sellers, Stein said. He expects to see a growing number of e-tail transactions like this one during the next several months, as new funding for dot-com companies continues to dry up.