Gazoontite

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

~ the eulogy ~

Gazoontite sold things to people whose lungs did not work properly. Mattress encasements that dust mites could not get through, HEPA air purifiers, vacuum cleaners rated for allergen capture. Soon-Chart Yu, a former Clorox brand manager, started it in 1998 on the premise that allergy and asthma sufferers were a huge market nobody had bothered to serve in one place. He was not wrong about the market. Americans were spending over six billion dollars a year on that category, and allergies were the second most searched health topic on the internet after depression.

The first store opened on Union Street in San Francisco in March 1999, and four more followed, with Costa Mesa and New York among them. The web site ran on a Java application server, which is why every page on gazoontite.com lived behind the URL /default.sph/Gaz.class/, and why the home page was a meta-refresh stub that bounced you into the app. The keyword tag on that stub is one of the great artifacts of the period: it lists sixty-odd allergy terms and then eight misspellings of the company's own name, from Gazoontight to Guzuntite, on the theory that people typing a sneeze into a search box would not get it right the first time.

A store in San Francisco selling two hundred dollar bedding to Americans with credit cards was not a thing that had any reach into Turkey in 2000. I was sixteen and on a 56k modem, and the concept of buying a pillowcase over the internet was science fiction in both directions: nobody was selling, nobody was paying by card. If you had allergies in Ankara you went to the pharmacy on the corner and asked. The whole business model assumed a country that had already decided the web was a place you spent money.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Gazoontite raised thirty-one million dollars. Hummer Winblad Venture Partners put money in, so did Baccharis Capital of Menlo Park. In early 2000, with the bubble already leaking, the company spent about seven million of it on marketing: a billboard on Highway 101, radio spots, and two Muni buses wrapped so that the word Gazoontite drove around San Francisco all day. The mascot was a duck named Gilligan.

In February 2000 the board hired Heidrick & Struggles to find a more seasoned chief executive, the standard move for a company being groomed for an IPO. In June, Yu agreed to be replaced by Daniel Korn, a veteran of the Big & Tall Casual Male clothing chain, and resigned as a director. By then the thing the new CEO had been hired to do, which was get public fast, had stopped being possible.

~ the unraveling ~

What changed over that summer was what investors wanted to see. A business-to-consumer company could attract a valuation of ten to fifty times anticipated revenue in early 2000; by the autumn the comparison was a traditional retailer at roughly double. Yu later put it plainly, that the company had fallen prey "to market multiples instead of business fundamentals." The venture firms turned off the tap. With enough cash to reach the end of the year and no more, Gazoontite shut down online sales in early October 2000 and filed for voluntary bankruptcy protection. All but about thirty of its hundred and twenty people were let go, Korn among them.

~ the second life ~

Yu did not let go. "As the founder, I didn't want to see my baby die," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. He called Craig Womack, a former president of The Sharper Image who had been a finalist in the CEO search that replaced him, and with Baccharis behind them they formed a new company called Gilligan Enterprises, named for the duck. On the day before Thanksgiving 2000, San Francisco Bankruptcy Court Judge Dennis Montali approved the sale of three stores plus the Gazoontite name and logo for somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million dollars. Womack moved the headquarters to Larkspur, cut the catalog from two thousand items to one thousand, and talked about fifty stores inside four years.

That did not happen either, but the brand outlasted the website by a wide margin. The Java storefront kept answering requests long after anyone was minding it, serving the same About Us page as late as June 2005. Today gazoontite.com is a HugeDomains parking lot. The eight deliberate misspellings in that old keyword tag are still sitting in the Internet Archive, waiting for a search engine that died before most of its intended audience ever typed a sneeze into one.

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