Cdandco

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

~ the obituary ~

Marc Bruezau started Cdandco in 1995 in Asnières-sur-Seine, on the northwest edge of Paris, selling multimedia products by post. The product was the CD-ROM, which in 1995 meant everything: encyclopedias, language courses, flight simulators, clip-art collections, the entire category of software that came in a jewel case and had to be physically carried to your house. Cdandco printed a catalog with that name on the cover and mailed it to people.

The web arm opened in 1997 and cdandco.com became one of the first real French e-commerce sites, early enough that the company could accurately call itself a pioneer and have nobody argue. Over the following six years it accumulated somewhere between a hundred and twenty thousand customers, depending on which count you take, against revenue of 41 million francs, a little over six million euros. In February 2000 it raised 50 million francs, at the precise moment in history when raising money against a French internet business was easiest.

Underneath all of it the catalog kept doing the heavy lifting. The majority of the turnover was still coming through the traditional mail-order channel, not the website, which made Cdandco a print business wearing an internet valuation. That combination was survivable in a rising market and lethal in a falling one.

~ the case file ~

~ april 2001 ~

The market fell. Cdandco was placed in redressement judiciaire, French receivership, on 18 April 2001, thirteen months after the fundraising. On 19 June 2001 the court approved a plan de cession transferring the business to Rue du Commerce, the high-tech retailer that was busy becoming one of the few French dot-coms with a future. The price was never published.

~ what the archive shows ~

The Wayback Machine is unusually precise about the rest. On 1 July 2001, two weeks after the court signed the transfer, cdandco.com was still redirecting to its own store under /cdco, running as itself under new ownership. By 31 March 2002 the same address returned a 301 to rueducommerce.fr/jeuxvideo/, the video-game section of the buyer's shop. Somewhere in those eight months the brand stopped being a brand and became a doorway.

By December 2004 the domain was serving Rue du Commerce's storefront outright, and the company whose name was on it had been in liquidation since 23 November of that year. Three and a half years passed between the receivership and the legal end, which is the normal speed of a French liquidation and says nothing about when the shop actually closed.

I was eleven when Cdandco started and seventeen when the court took it, and buying software over the internet with a card was not a thing available to me or to most people around me in those years. The CD-ROM reached Turkey in enormous quantity. It arrived through shops and through copies, not through a catalog you mailed a coupon to, and the part of this story that is genuinely foreign is not the technology but the postal habit underneath it.

~ the domain ~

cdandco.com answers today with a 114-byte page whose only job is to bounce you to a parking lander. Rue du Commerce, which took the business off the court in 2001, was still a name in French retail long after the company it absorbed had stopped existing on paper. The catalog is gone in the way that catalogs go, which is completely.

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