Customers this week attempting to visit luckymonkey.com are redirected, to crowdsavings.com, where a banner announces Lucky Monkey’s sale. Screenshot from crowdsavings.com.
One of Kansas City’s first players in daily deals websites is getting out of the game.
As The Kansas City Business Journal reported on Tuesday, Lucky Monkey, a company based in Johnson County in suburban Kansas City, sold to CrowdSavings of Tampa, Fla. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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“CrowdSavings was clearly the best choice for our customers and our merchants in taking Lucky Monkey to the next level of success,” Kathy Boos, co-founder of Lucky Monkey and publisher of 435 South Magazine, said in a release (left, photo from twitter.com). “We are also very pleased that Lucky Monkey’s business development executive, Karen Myers, will be staying on with CrowdSavings in the same role, making the transition even smoother for customers and clients.”
Lucky Monkey customers will be unaffected by the acquisition, as account information has been seamlessly transferred to CrowdSavings and all existing Lucky Monkey certificates and credits will be honored.
For a time last year, Lucky Monkey was the only daily deals site in Kansas City other than Groupon. But a proliferation of the sites soon followed, and when CrowdSavings came calling, Lucky Monkey seized the opportunity. With the acquisition, CrowdSavings enters its 11th market. The company has targeted expansion to 16 markets by year’s end.
“The Lucky Monkey team has done a tremendous job in developing a solid base of loyal customers as a result of working with the highest quality merchants in their area,” CrowdSavings CFO Douglas Bauer said in the release. “With our available resources, we look forward to building upon their success as we continue to expand.”
Given industry trends, the Lucky Monkey acquisition may not be the last such deal seen in the Silicon Prairie. Consolidation has been a dominant theme in the crowded daily deals space this year: as All Things D reported on Tuesday, there have been 35 daily deals mergers and acquisitions so far this year compared to just five in the same span last year. Although those numbers are inflated by the overall increase in daily deals sites, the 700-percent increase is significant nonetheless.
“A lot of daily deal sites started last year, chasing Groupon money, but they’re incredibly hard to run in just one city,” CrowdSavings CEO Chad Jaquays told the Business Journal. “They’re easy to start, but hard to scale. Lucky Monkey had a nice little business. (Their revenue) is great for us, but not enough for one market to survive.”
