Former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson launching Enjoy in 2015, has raised $30M to help consumers find products
The Genius Behind The Apple Store Wants To Help You Choose Your Next Gadget — Former J.C. Penny CEO and Apple retail chief Ron Johnson has a new startup that hopes to help …
Context & Ripple Effects
When this was reported, Ron Johnson was attempting a retail comeback: after running Apple Stores through their formative years and a turbulent J.C. Penney CEO stint, he had told reporters a month earlier about plans for an on-demand gadget delivery service, and the $30M round confirmed the project had a name — Enjoy — ahead of its planned 2015 debut.
The arc since then has been dramatic: Enjoy launched in mid-2015 with white-glove delivery and free in-home setup, scaled through a $150M Series C that brought total funding to $350M, and ultimately collapsed into a bankruptcy filing and sale to Asurion less than a year after a SPAC merger.
First-order effects
- The $30M gave Johnson runway to build out Enjoy's core bet — pairing online gadget sales with personal delivery and expert setup — which materialized as the 2015 e-commerce launch with no-cost in-home service.
Second-order effects
- Enjoy's model put it in direct competition with carrier and retailer installation services, pushing device makers and insurers toward partnerships rather than building their own doorstep-setup operations — a path that ended with Asurion buying the company out of bankruptcy.
Third-order effects
- Enjoy's rise and fall traces the lifecycle of the 'service layer on top of e-commerce' thesis: well-funded premium concierge models struggled to sustain unit economics, and the assets migrated to insurance-adjacent buyers like Asurion via the 2021–22 SPAC-and-bankruptcy cycle.
The trend: Premium at-home tech setup startups attracted hundreds of millions in venture capital on the strength of Apple Store-style service economics, but most of that capital ended up consolidated by warranty and insurance players when the standalone model failed.