Karmaloop

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

~ the goodbye ~

streetwear e-commerce was a world i watched from the outside, if i watched it at all. i was a computer engineer in ankara, not a kid saving up for a hoodie shipped from boston. karmaloop belonged to a subculture and a shipping map that did not include me.

greg selkoe started it in 1999 out of his parents' basement, built around streetwear and the brands normal catalogs ignored. it became the place to buy the labels that skate and hip-hop kids wanted. by 2013 it was doing around 127 million dollars a year and had real say over which small brands broke through to a wider crowd.

the money did not stay. karmaloop poured cash into ventures that did not work, including an expensive run at a tv channel and a set of spin-off retail sites. sales slid while the costs held. in march 2015 it filed for chapter 11, owing brands and partners millions. shiekh shoes bought the name in 2016, and that owner filed for its own bankruptcy the year after.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

for a stretch of the 2000s karmaloop was where you went for the clothes that had not reached the mall yet. it ran a media arm and an affiliate program of "street team" members who earned credit for referrals, which turned customers into a sales force. the site did not invent streetwear. it built the pipe that carried it to people who could not find it locally.

~ the actual end ~

the collapse was not a failed idea. karmaloop had a working business and a loyal base. what broke it was spending built for a company several times its size. the failed tv money and the spin-offs drained the cash that kept the core store paid up with its brands. by the time it filed, the debt to the labels it had helped build was the part that stung.

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