Peabody, Massachusetts (December 23, 2010):   Today, Ray Hendrickson, President of Christianbook.com, announced the purchase of Pennywiselearning.com, a family-owned and operated company dedicated to serving the Christian Homeschool community.

Randy Pratt, owner of Pennywiselearning.com stated “After eight years of serving the Christian homeschooling community through PennywiseLearning.com, we are privileged to announce the sale of our business to Christianbook.com.  This thoughtful and significant decision comes as a result of being called to pursue full-time ministry in our local church, and we’re excited about this challenging opportunity to serve the Lord in a new way.  In order to maintain the integrity of our homeschooling mission and honor the relationships we’ve developed with our customers, it was of utmost importance to us to find a company that was compatible with our personal and professional values to continue our work. While Christianbook.com has been our worthy competitor in the market, we have always shared a common goal: to provide the best Christian resources to homeschool families at the best prices. Christianbook.com was the best match for us.  Pennywiselearning.com had recently purchased Bookpeddler.com which is also part of the acquisition.

Ray Hendrickson commented “Just like Pennywise, CBD is a family-owned and -operated company dedicated to serving Christians worldwide. One of our specialty areas is homeschooling—we’re considered a leader in the market with more than 35,000 products available.  Though we’ve been competitors with Pennywise in the past, we’ve always admired the Pratts’ core beliefs of encouraging, educating, and empowering families. We applaud—and share—the values upheld by their mission. For more than 30 years we too have dedicated our efforts to offering our customers the biggest selection of quality Christian materials with the best savings and the greatest service.  We are honored to be entrusted now with serving Pennywise customers. The Pratts have greatly enhanced the homeschooling market with their personal experience, professional integrity, and devoted stewardship. We appreciate all they have done and plan to incorporate some of their ideas and approaches into our business strategy.”

In closing, Pratt commented “We consider ourselves blessed to leave a legacy of helping thousands of families with our knowledge and expertise. So we’re especially grateful to be able to entrust our business to such a wonderful company.”  As an aside to this announcement, on the day the transaction closed Randy and Kristen Pratt received their ministry papers in the mail, something they were not expecting to happen for a few more weeks.  This served as an encouraging sign to both parties that all the puzzle pieces had fallen exactly into place as they were meant to be.

As part of the transaction, Christianbook.com has acquired the inventory, customer list, the website, and the various domain names associated with Pennywise.  Since the company is privately held, no terms of the transaction are disclosed.

Christianbook.com is an eight-time recipient of the BizRate Circle of Excellence Platinum Award. This award is presented to top performing online retailers who have met the strict criteria set by BizRate Research to recognize outstanding customer service.

As a platinum award winner, Christianbook.com is in the company of the highest performing online retailers, having scored 9.0 or above on all seven key customer satisfaction metrics. The catalog arm of Christianbook.com is Christian Book Distributors; CBD is the largest religious catalog company in the world, sending out over 65 mailings of unique catalogs to millions of customers each year. The website carries more than 350,000 Christian books, Bibles, kids’ titles, gifts, DVDs, CDs, academic references, commentaries, church supplies, and more!

CBD is honored to have been recognized in The Boston Globe 100 Top Places to Work for two years in a row, ranking #8 among midsized companies.

For more information, please contact Bridget Timmins at (978) 573-2201.