Whatever Happened To Pearachute After Shark Tank?

With life and schedules as hectic as they are nowadays, it can be difficult for families to find a service that works in their favor. One plucky entrepreneur believed that she had the solution: Desiree Vargas Wrigley, who created Pearachute.

Pearachute was designed to be a subscription service that allowed parents to find special discounts for local activities. What made the service especially valuable for busy families was that, if scheduling conflicts came up, parents had the ability to drop out of the activity for up to an hour before it began. Rival services did not allow for cancellations at such short notice. Costing $79 a month for five classes or $99 for unlimited classes, the service had a variety of activities available depending on the child's personal preferences. 

Wrigley took the dive into the "Shark Tank" for Episode 7, Season 9, where she came looking for an offer for $500,000 for a 6% stake in the company. At this point, her business had only been running for four months and had made $50,000. The business was situated in Chicago, but she hoped to expand to more cities with the help of a shark. When some of the sharks questioned how she planned to do this, she found it hard to articulate and the majority of them dropped out. However, Mark Cuban took a chance on her, offering her $500,000 for 15% of the business, which she gladly accepted. Read on to find out what became of Pearachute.

Coming away from "Shark Tank" with an investment from a shark is undoubtedly an amazing feeling for a budding entrepreneur, but it's not unusual for the agreed-upon deal to fall through following the taping of the episode. In fact, a Forbes study found that 43% of people who got deals on the show did not have their offer go through in the end. It's usually hard to find any concrete reason as to why both parties chose not to stick together, but this is not the case with Pearachute. 

According to an interview with the Chicago Tribune, the deal made between Pearachute founder Desiree Vargas Wrigley and investor Mark Cuban actually fell apart long before Wrigley's episode of "Shark Tank" aired in November 2017. "The terms were terrible," Wrigley said. "There was a lot of back-and-forth over what ultimately wasn't that big of a check from his team." However, despite being upset by the terms, Wrigley could see where Cuban was coming from as an investor.

With the relative youth of her company at the time, Wrigley understood that Cuban might have been a tad uncomfortable with the terms laid out. Nevertheless, she saw it as a good thing, saying, "I'm really glad we didn't end up taking the deal because we're worth a lot more as a company now." This interview with Wrigley took place in October 2017, however, and things are not as rosy on the Pearachute front these days.

Unfortunately, in spite of the gumption of Pearachute founder Desiree Vargas Wrigley and the initial support of Mark Cuban, Pearachute went out of business some time after the deal with Cuban fell through. Initially, things weren't looking too bad: Vargas Wrigley took advantage of the Shark Tank Effect and a wave of sign-ups to initially expand Pearachute into Dallas, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Washington. The company managed to land a lot of money from venture capitalists, bringing in $3.1 million between 2019 and 2020. 

The COVID-19 pandemic changed Pearachute's marketing strategy, as it did for many other companies. During this period, Pearachute went national, held a successful crowdfunding campaign, and it even managed to make $1.3 million in 2021. But it looks like a pandemic-mandated switch-up to offering virtual experiences for children versus helping families find things to do together out of the house was less successful in the long run.

Sadly, the company now appears to have shuttered its doors for good: Pearachute closed down in 2022. Its website is down and its social media pages are also dormant, with no posts on Facebook or X for several years. It's not all bad news for the Pearachute founder, however: Vargas Wrigley is now the CIO at a company called P33 Chicago, which is "on a mission to transform Chicago into a tier one technology and innovation hub driving inclusive economic growth," according to its website.