Loserkids.com

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

~ the obituary ~

Loserkids.com was incorporated on 18 March 1999 and trading by that June, timed against Blink-182's Enema of the State and the tour it took its name from. Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge built it with Dylan Anderson, a friend from childhood, and the stated reason was flat and practical: kids kept telling them on tour that there was no skate shop within driving distance of wherever they lived.

So the band sold them one by mail. Merchandise first, then everything adjacent to it, from Birdhouse decks and Billabong shirts through to cosmetics and CDs the band had picked out. It was a shop with a taste rather than a catalog, which in 1999 was a real distinction, because most e-commerce of that year was a spreadsheet with photographs attached.

It became inactive on 11 September 2014, registration listed as terminated. Fifteen years, which is longer than the band managed without a breakup.

~ the case file ~

~ what a band store was for ~

In 1999 a band selling straight to its audience over the web was not the obvious move. The label handled merchandise, the merchandise arrived in a box at the venue, and if you were not at the venue you got nothing. Loserkids skipped that chain and put the catalog somewhere a fourteen year old in a town with no record store could reach.

The scene grew the same machinery around itself over the following decade. Hot Topic did it at mall scale and PureVolume did the discovery half. Labels started running storefronts of their own. Loserkids arrived earlier than most of them and never got anywhere near as large as any of them.

~ the brands behind the counter ~

Hoppus and DeLonge started Atticus Clothing with Anderson in 2001, and DeLonge started Macbeth Footwear in 2002. Loserkids was where both were sold. For a stretch of the early 2000s the site was the front door to a small apparel business owned by the biggest pop punk band on earth, which is a stranger thing than it sounded at the time.

~ how it wound down ~

There was no announcement and no farewell page anybody archived. Captures continue past 2014 and show outlet and archive pages rather than a working catalog, which is what a store looks like once the inventory is gone and nobody has canceled the hosting.

None of this reached me. Ordering skate hardware from Southern California to Ankara in 2002 did not happen, not at the shipping cost and not through the customs form. The music got here anyway, on burned discs and then as files off the internet cafe machines. The shop the band built around the music stayed on the far side of an ocean, and I only found out what it had been years after it stopped existing.

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