Eve.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

eve.com sold luxury beauty products on the early american web. mariam naficy and varsha rao founded it in 1998, picked a category nobody serious was running online (high-end skincare and makeup), and convinced the brands that the web was a real distribution channel. by 1999 fortune ranked it the sixth-best e-commerce site in the world. that was the high water mark.

in 2000 idealab, bill gross's incubator out of pasadena, bought eve.com for $110 million. the deal made the founders rich on paper and put eve.com under the same roof as the rest of the idealab portfolio. then the nasdaq peaked in march and started coming down. idealab had been preparing an ipo of its own. the ipo did not happen.

by the autumn idealab was choosing which of its portfolio companies to fund into the next year. eve.com lost the vote. on 20 october 2000 the site shut down, 164 staff were laid off, and the inventory was liquidated. the brand was resold a few months later to sephora, which used it briefly as a redirect and then quietly retired it.

i was 16 in october 2000, in ankara on a 33.6k modem, and the american beauty-etailer category did not register at any layer. eve.com sat in the part of the dot-com bust i can read about now without having lived. the names i remember are pets.com (the sock puppet on tv) and napster (the lawsuits in the news). eve.com was for a customer i was not.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it sold ~

eve.com's catalog leaned premium. clinique. mac. the kind of brand whose us distribution was tightly controlled through department stores and which had spent years refusing to sell on the web. naficy got them to say yes by promising a presentation that did not look like a discount channel. the site had editorial content alongside the storefront and a customer-service tier that was unusual for an etailer of that era.

the founders were also unusual. naficy was 27 when she started the company; rao was 28. both came out of stanford GSB. the brand profile they built leaned on that, which made them readable to both venture capital and beauty-industry editors in a way most 1998 e-commerce startups were not.

~ the unraveling ~

eve.com itself was actually doing fine. revenue was growing, margins on luxury beauty were healthier than on pet food or groceries, and the brand relationships were locked in. the problem was its parent. idealab was running close to twenty portfolio companies in parallel, and when its own funding plans fell apart in mid-2000, it had to triage. profitable but small was not the bet idealab was set up to make.

~ the next chapter ~

naficy went on to found minted, the design marketplace, in 2008. minted is still alive in 2026 and has now lasted longer than her first company by more than a decade. rao went on to run lululemon's digital business and later airbnb's home rentals. eve.com itself exists as a footnote in dot-com retrospectives and as the founder origin story for a much more durable company.

and "eve.com" the domain has had several owners since 2000. as of 2026 it points to a generic landing page. nothing of the original site remains.

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