International- MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is auctioning off more than 800 items, including pillow-making equipment.
- Lindell told WCCO that MyPillow needed to deal with excess inventory.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says he's auctioning off more than 800 items — including equipment from his pillow factory in Minnesota — after losing more than $100 million in retail sales.
The auction is being held on K-BID Online Auctions and is set to close on July 18, 2023. MyPillow is auctioning off 824 items, according to the listing page. Various items were up for grabs, including a 2005 Dodge Sprinter Van with a "cracked windshield," Apple iMacs, and a stained ottoman.
Lindell told the Minnesota television station WCCO that the auction was a response to a change toward a direct-to-consumer business strategy. Lindell added that MyPillow needed to deal with an excess inventory so employees could keep working.
"We have all this retail stuff. The retailers have abandoned us. What are we supposed to do, everybody? Just paperweights there? No, we are auctioning it off," Lindell said in a Facebook livestream on Monday.
"Before they did this to MyPillow, we were so big that we needed like four times of the equipment we had right now to make retail packaging, to make the retail pillows," Lindell continued. "So my guys said, 'Hey, can we get rid of some of this stuff and sublease part of that building?' Which we said, 'Fine.'"
The pillow maven previously told WCCO in January that his election-fraud claims had caused MyPillow to lose $100 million in retail sales.
Lindell did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether he intended to sell off other assets. He was still using a private plane in October and previously told Insider that the plane's door fell off while he was loading up on it to travel to a conservative event.
Lindell is an avowed supporter of former President Donald Trump's baseless election-fraud claims. He's fending off a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit from the voting-technology company Dominion Voting Systems and another from Smartmatic over accusations of pushing these election-fraud claims.
"I will spend everything I have and sell everything I have if that's what it takes," Lindell told Insider in December 2021 while referring to his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results.
However, Lindell's business was hit hard after multiple retailers cut ties with MyPillow. In June last year, Walmart told Insider that stores would no longer carry MyPillow products, although they would still be available online. Other retailers, including Costco, Bed Bath & Beyond, QVC, JCPenney, and Wayfair, have similarly distanced themselves from Lindell.
And if that wasn't enough, Lindell was terminated as a client by the Minnesota Bank & Trust in February last year, a month after the bank called him a "reputation risk."
But that did little to curb Lindell's spending. He told Insider in March last year that he was spending a million dollars a month to develop a video-streaming app and a social-media platform.
And Lindell previously told Insider that he had to borrow $10 million in 2022 to keep MyPillow afloat.
Correction: July 11, 2023 — An earlier version of this story mischaracterized comments from Mike Lindell. Local media published them in paraphrase, not as direct quotation.