Living.com

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

~ the obit ~

in 2000 i was sixteen, in ankara, getting online through a 56k modem on ttnet. living.com was an american home-furnishings dot-com that ran for thirteen months and never reached the world i was in. the idea of shipping a sofa through a courier from austin to a stranger's living room was not a category turkish e-commerce was attempting in 2000, and the english-language sites i was reading about did not cover home goods. i learned the name from the dot-com bust retrospectives.

the company started as shop4home in 1999, run by shaun holliday out of austin, texas. it rebranded to living.com that summer with a mandate to be the everything-store for furniture and lamps. by early 2000 it had raised over a hundred million dollars from media-industry investors and consumer-brand venture funds. the pitch deck assumed amazon's playbook for books would translate one-to-one to furniture, the same logistics and recommendation flywheel applied to a different sku catalog.

amazon itself bought into the pitch. on february 1 2000 the two companies announced a five-year exclusive partnership. amazon would route a hundred and forty-five million dollars in payments to living.com in exchange for being the home-furnishings supplier inside amazon's new home living store. amazon also took an eighteen percent stake plus warrants for another nine percent. the home living store opened on amazon.com in may 2000, three months later the nasdaq was already on its second leg down.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

the dot-com financing market essentially closed in march and april of 2000. the high-burn category was the first to lose new rounds, the home-goods category needed the highest burn of any e-commerce vertical because a single shipped item could be a thousand dollar piece of furniture that cost three hundred dollars to deliver and absorbed twenty percent return rates. living.com was running gross-margin negative on every transaction with the assumption that scale would fix it. scale was not going to arrive in time.

the company tried to raise a bridge round in june and july. nobody wrote a check. the amazon partnership, structured as a payment from living.com to amazon for the storefront slot, became a fixed cost the company could not service. shaun holliday told staff on august 15 that the board had voted to shut down, the same day the bankruptcy filing went out.

~ the day it died ~

august 15 2000. two hundred and seventy-five people laid off in austin. the cnn money headline was "living.com has died." the inventory in the warehouse was liquidated through third-party sellers. the amazon home living store was quietly repointed away from living.com to a generic amazon-managed catalog over the next quarter, the partnership ended without a press release.

~ what got buried with it ~

the dot-com bust era has a graveyard already in this room, [[pets-com]] and [[webvan]] and [[boo-com]] and [[kozmo-com]] are the brand names that survived as shorthand for what went wrong. living.com is the quieter one. it did not have a sock puppet mascot or a one-hour-delivery tagline. it had a partnership with amazon that everyone read as cover for survival and a couch business that needed a decade more of broadband and last-mile logistics before it could work. wayfair and west elm eventually did the version of living.com that succeeded, fifteen years later, after the infrastructure caught up to the idea.

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