- 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.
- Various items, ranging from a van with a “cracked windshield” to a stained ottoman, were on sale.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says he’s auctioning off more than 800 items — including equipment from his Minnesota pillow factory — 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 live stream 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 from Insider on whether he intends to sell off other assets. He was still using a private plane in October 2022 — he told Insider his plane door fell off its hinge 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 currently fending off a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit from voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems, and another from Smartmatic, for pushing these election fraud claims.
"I will spend everything I have and sell everything I have if that's what it takes," Lindell previously told Insider in December 2021, referring to his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results.
However, Lindell's business was hit hard after multiple retailers decided to cut ties with MyPillow. In June 2022, Walmart told Insider that they would no longer be carrying MyPillow products in their stores, although they would still be available online. Other retailers, like 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 2022, a month after the bank called him a "reputation risk."
But that did little to curb Lindell's spending. He told Insider in March 2022 that he was spending a million dollars a month to develop his own video-streaming app and social media platform.
And a year later, in March, Lindell told Insider that he had to borrow $10 million in 2022 just to keep MyPillow afloat.