Kaspien

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

~ the obit ~

What died on 1 May 2024 was a company in Spokane Valley, Washington that sold other companies' products on Amazon for them. It ran their storefronts and their advertising across ten Amazon marketplaces, with Walmart and eBay on the side. It was publicly traded, which is unusual for an agency, and the reason it was publicly traded is the strangest part of the story.

The listing came from 1972. Robert J. Higgins founded Trans World Entertainment in Albany, New York that December and opened his first store, Record Town, the year after. The company went public in July 1986 and spent two decades buying up failing music retailers, Camelot Music and Wherehouse Entertainment among them. In February 2006 it bought the Musicland Group, which brought Sam Goody and Suncoast Motion Picture Company with it.

Physical music then did what physical music did. Trans World lost money every year from 2006 through 2010 and then pulled a 2.2 million dollar profit out of 2011 by closing locations and squeezing margins. The decade after that was one long contraction. In January 2020 it sold the entire FYE chain to Sunrise Records for 10 million dollars, which is about what one good mall store had cost to fit out in the nineties.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ from Record Town to the marketplace ~

The replacement business was bought in October 2016 for 76 million dollars. etailz had started in 2008 in Spokane as GreenCupboards, an eco-friendly products retailer founded by Josh Neblett and Tom Simpson, and took the etailz name in 2013. Its actual trade was knowing how Amazon's marketplace worked: which listing wins the buy box, and how to keep inventory moving through somebody else's warehouse.

That profession arrived in Turkey on 19 September 2018, the day Amazon opened amazon.com.tr, and within a couple of years "we manage your Amazon store" was a line on business cards here too. It is a real job and a precarious one, because the platform owns both the customer and the rules, and can change the rules before lunch.

On 3 September 2020 the parent company gave up on the old identity completely. Trans World Entertainment renamed itself Kaspien Holdings and etailz became Kaspien. The Trans World Entertainment name had gone to Sunrise Records along with the stores. A 48-year-old corporate shell took the name of the thing it had bought four years earlier.

~ the cracks ~

The marketplace business was never comfortable either. etailz cut twenty percent of its staff in January 2019, after the parent reported a 14 million dollar quarterly loss, and its founding CEO was gone by that March. The interim CEO at the end, Brock Kowalchuk, was the finance chief who moved up in March 2022.

The market stopped believing before the company did. Kaspien left the Nasdaq voluntarily in June 2023 and then left the OTCQB in January 2024, deregistering its shares entirely. A company that delists itself twice in seven months is doing arithmetic in public.

~ the day it died ~

In December 2023 the board announced the wind-down, citing an assessment of the company's cash and liquidity position against its near-term debt maturities. The Spokane Journal of Business carried it on the 26th. The stated plan was to keep operating until 1 May 2024 and then stop, and that is exactly what happened, which is rarer than it sounds for a company in this condition.

kaspien.com answers nothing now, on either scheme. The record stores it grew out of are already buried on this site under their own names. The company that outlived all of them kept the stock ticker going for four more years after the last shelf was sold. It spent those years selling other people's goods inside somebody else's shop, and then it ran out of runway.

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