Bluefly

» see bluefly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

bluefly was one of the oldest e-commerce sites still standing when it died. it launched in 1998, deep in the dot-com bubble that killed boo.com and pets.com within a couple of years. bluefly did not flame out. it sold discounted designer clothing to american shoppers, quietly, for twenty years, outliving almost the entire class it graduated with. then one morning it was gone.

the company started earlier and stranger. ken seiff founded it in 1991 as pivot rules, a maker of golf-themed sportswear, and took it public in 1997. in 1998 he killed the clothing line and renamed the whole thing bluefly, pointing it at the web as an off-price designer outlet. it was an early bet that people would buy designer labels online at a discount, sight unseen. for a while the bet paid, and bluefly.com was a name in american online fashion before most fashion was online. it never shipped to turkey and never tried to, so from ankara it was always a name in someone else's economy.

the long decline was the usual one. amazon and the flash-sale sites cut into off-price. bluefly changed hands and strategies more than once, and by 2018 it had rebuilt itself on a third-party marketplace platform. it did not help. on the first of february 2019 bluefly filed for chapter 7 and shut down the same day, no warning to customers, half a million to a million dollars in assets against up to ten million in debt. a site that had survived the entire dot-com era ended in a single unannounced morning.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it outlived ~

the striking thing about bluefly is the length of the run. boo.com lasted eighteen months. pets.com lasted about the same. kozmo and webvan, the famous 1998-to-2001 casualties, were gone before bluefly had really found trouble. it kept going through the 2008 crash, through the rise of amazon fashion, through the flash-sale boom that should have finished it. twenty years is a very long time to be a mid-tier online retailer that never quite won.

~ the day it died ~

there was no farewell. customers with open orders and store credit found out from the bankruptcy filing. the assets, mostly the brand and the domain, went toward an auction. bluefly.com had spent two decades as the place you went for a discounted label you could not find on sale anywhere else, and it closed the way the newer, faster sites did, all at once, with the lights simply off one morning.

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