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FOUNDED HERE 1982 · IPO 2010 · THE LONG SLIDE AFTER 2013
Not a dot-com startup — printed here because its win belongs to the era: Vera Bradley was founded in Fort Wayne in 1982 by Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia R. Miller, selling quilted cotton handbags from a city that had no reason to expect a national fashion brand; its full history sits in the Business record. Its public-market moment arrived squarely in the e-commerce era, when a direct-to-consumer web channel stood alongside its boutiques and wholesale accounts. On October 20, 2010, Vera Bradley priced its initial public offering at 16 dollars a share, the top of its range, selling eleven million shares and raising about 176 million dollars on the Nasdaq under the symbol VRA. Baekgaard held roughly twenty-six percent of the company after the offering — the kind of founder stake the record, through the offering coverage, actually documents.
And then the honest tail, which this section prints rather than trims: revenue peaked at about 535.7 million dollars in 2013, and the brand's long decline followed — 530.9 million in fiscal 2014, and 269.65 million dollars by fiscal 2026, roughly half the peak. Vera Bradley's place in a winners section is real but bounded: a Fort Wayne consumer company that executed a successful public offering at the height of the web-retail era, and then spent a decade shrinking in public. Both halves are the record.
Sources:
- Indiana Business Journal, October 2010 — Vera Bradley's IPO raises 176 million dollars, priced at 16 dollars a share.
- Renaissance Capital — the Vera Bradley offering record: October 20, 2010, eleven million shares at 16 dollars. renaissancecapital.com
- Vera Bradley revenue record — the 535.7-million-dollar peak in 2013 and 269.65 million dollars in fiscal 2026. companiesmarketcap.com
- the Businesses section of this history — the Vera Bradley company history.