Viant Partners With Whole Foods Market to Spin-off WholePeople.com

Business Wire, March 16, 2000

Business Editors

THORNTON, Colo. & BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 16, 2000

Offering a Unique Blend of Natural Products, WholePeople.com

Serves the $230 billion Whole Living Industry

WholePeople.com, the Internet-based natural food, supplement and health care subsidiary of Whole Foods Market Inc. (Nasdaq: WFMI), and Viant Corporation (Nasdaq: VIAN), a leading digital business builder, today announced the successful launch of www.wholepeople.com.

Whole Foods Market partnered with Viant to conceptualize and build its new spin-off, which was developed to serve the $230 billion "Whole Living" market.

To accelerate the development of the business, Viant incubated WholePeople.com's team within its San Francisco office. Viant's Incubation Services provide start-ups and spin-offs with a proven process and comprehensive set of resources to take business plans from concept to market in Internet time. Viant's Incubation Services augment Viant's core digital consulting and implementation offering with additional advisory and infrastructure services geared expressly for new businesses. Incubation clients move into Viant's offices, which immerses the new business in the digital world through access to the Viant community and its sophisticated technology infrastructure. Viant's Incubation Services accelerates time to market by compressing decision making and knowledge transfer between the client and Viant's experienced digital business builders.

WholePeople.com was designed and developed in just four months. This world-class, retail "dot com" site showcases a unique collection of products, community and content, which is divided into five key areas: Health and Body, Food, Natural Home, Travel and Heart. WholePeople.com's vision is to offer visitors a wealth of information, as well as natural products from around the world.

"We partnered with Viant based on its excellent track record of building digital businesses in close collaboration with its clients," said John Mackey, CEO of WholePeople.com and Whole Foods Market Inc. "In the end, having the option for our team to move in with Viant was very important to us. Viant not only helped us develop, design, and execute on our vision to leverage Whole Foods Market's brand on the Internet, they did it quickly, due in large part to the fact that our teams were working side by side the entire time."

In the early stages of the project, Viant worked closely with WholePeople.com to identify and document strategic business goals, brainstorm potential initiatives, and prioritize those initiatives into a phased implementation timeline. WholePeople.com and Viant conducted multiple working sessions to envision a best-of-breed e-commerce solution, while taking into account the accelerated development timeframes. Additionally, Viant helped WholePeople.com design a digital operating model for the organization that took into account the distributed nature of WholePeople.com and the partnership-heavy, network-centric nature of the their business model.

"Partnering with a leader in the "Whole Living" market was an exciting opportunity for Viant," said Bob Gett, CEO of Viant. "Our work with WholePeople.com is a great example of our ability to strategize, design and build truly innovative, digital businesses from the ground up."

In addition to WholePeople.com, Viant has incubated a number of companies over the past four years including Ecast (www.ecastinc.com), the consumer entertainment industry's first networked, digital, out-of-home entertainment provider, Della.com (www.dellaweddings.com), which recently received major funding from Amazon.com, Neiman Marcus, and other retail and venture capital sources, and Sputnik7 (www.sputnik7.com), an award-winning interactive video and music site.

About WholePeople.com

Headquartered in Denver, CO, WholePeople.com was created by the joining of two existing Whole Foods Market businesses: Amrion, a nutritional supplement and direct marketing subsidiary, and WholeFoods.com, the e-commerce business launched by Whole Foods Market in March 1999.

WholeFoods Market, a Fortune 1000 company, owns and operates the country's largest chain of natural foods supermarkets based on sales and square footage. The company operates 108 stores in 22 states plus District of Columbia with total square footage of 2.8 million square feet.

About Viant Corporation

Viant is a leading Internet professional services firm providing strategic consulting, creative design and technology services to companies seeking to capitalize on the Internet. Viant is headquartered in Boston with offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, London, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.

This release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties are described in detail from time to time in Viant's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Viant is a trademark of Viant Corporation. All other company names and products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.