Why did The Sharper Image go out of business? Ironically while I never bought anything in the store, I was too young to have much money. The stores always seemed crowded and had a bunch of ‘neat’ things.
Did people just not buy the gadgets? Seems strange – you would think there would be enough of a market for a niche store like that.
They sold phony products and got caught at it.
Speaking as someone who worked at their home office for about 6 months, I’d like to believe it’s because their merchandise sucks. It’s all just shitty plastic gadgets that go bleep bloop and look space aged.
They did have a cool office though. Big Darth Vader and StormTrooper replicas in the lobby.
I remember drooling over their catalogs when I was a kid, but looking back I realized they weren’t really selling anything that anybody actually needed.
Crappy, overpriced merchandise, some of which was bordering on the “late-night-infomercial” scam level.
I imagine Best Buy was probably what broke their back.
Pre-internet they found you the cool gadgets and gizmoes. Once the internet came in to town it was easy for people to find all sorts of unique things on their own…better things too. People started to realize Sharper Image was overpriced crap mostly.
It shouldn’t have taken down the company, and normally one product’s failure wouldn’t. But the company’s profits were built around this one product.
Cutting 20% of sales will kill off any store.
Sharper Image was in a precarious line of work anyway. Electronics is a cutthroat, low-margin industry as that article notes. And it was a mall store geared at men. There are few of those in any mall, an indication of how hard it is to get men shopping and browsing in malls. Pulling the linchpin of their whole business was fatal.
FYI, I was traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday and saw ads in the Skymall catalog for a new company, founded by Richard Thalheimer, who founded the Sharper Image. It appears to sell similar products.
Skymall is allways entertaining to read, but it is seriously just a bunch of crap. I figure that the people that buy this stuff have loads of expendable income and no real instincts as to what is actually likely to be worthwhile.
So there’s a hole in the marketplace for DAK to make a comeback, then?
Agreed. It’d be nice to have an aluminum bat-warmer… if I made seven figures and liked to play baseball in winter.
The few things I bought at SI were indeed crap. I’m surprised they stayed in business this long.
I used to enjoy looking around in their shop, but I would never actually buy any of that junk. This is the first I’ve heard they’ve gone out of business.
At least the DAK catalog was entertaining. And the stuff wasn’t as overpriced, as I recall, though a lot of it was special purpose gadgets that had marginal use. I can’t recall that I ever bought any of them.
Maybe they could bring back Whole Earth Access while we’re at it.
I seem to recall reading the Consumer’s Report on the Ionic Breeze, in which it said the unit would work in a room that was something like 2’ x 2’ (and presumably x 7’ or so high). I thought this was explosively funny but no one seemed to.
Maybe I was in an alternative universe.
Where I live, there’s Brookstone. They mainly specialize in really soft fabrics (with slippers, pillows, blankets, and such), but also sell the same type of gadgets that Sharper Image had. I just bought this for the corner of my desk.
Brookstone is marginally better in that some of their stuff is overpriced, but exactly what you think. Like you say, they have nice slippers and blankets and stuff. It’s overpriced, but there is no expectation that it will do anything exept be comfy. I do remember them selling a pull string razor, which I’m sure would make you the only clean shaven fellow in the event of nuclear armagedon.
Speaking as a ‘consumer’ I must agree. My coworkers and I would often go to a food court for lunch, and then kill time at the mall until we had to go back to work. In Sharper Image I saw a bunch of stuff that A) looked good in catalogues but in real life not so much, B) was overpriced, and C) constantly made me wonder why anyone would want the gadgets they sold.
I went in to one during its “Going Out of Business Sale” and it looked like 1986. It was perfect for its era, and did well to last this long.