Miadora

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

~ the goodbye ~

Miadora sold diamonds over the web to Americans with credit cards, in a year when I was sixteen and getting online through a dial-up modem in Turkey. It is hard to overstate how far outside my life an $800 jewelry checkout was. Nobody I knew had bought anything online at all, from anywhere, and the idea that you would send that kind of money to a website you had learned about from a magazine ad was closer to science fiction than to shopping.

The company started in 1999 in San Mateo and raised money at the speed the period allowed. Sequoia Capital and a group of private investors came in first with $6.2 million. Amerindo Investment Advisors and Pivotal Asset Management led $25 million in September 1999, and Freeman Spogli put in another $20 million the following April. That is $51.2 million across three rounds for a company that had been open barely a year.

The pitch was the top of the market. Where most e-commerce of that era was arguing about whether people would buy books or pet food online, Miadora went straight for the category with the highest emotional stakes and the highest price per unit, and the numbers said it was working. The average order was over $800. The merchandising side later insisted the company had been on plan for sales.

It did not matter. By September 2000 the follow-on round had not appeared, a lender moved to foreclose, and Barry Gilbert, the chairman and chief executive, laid off the entire staff of about seventy-five on a Friday. A handful of people stayed behind to close the books.

~ the chronicle ~

~ eight hundred dollar carts ~

Selling fine jewelry online in 1999 meant solving a trust problem that nobody had solved yet. You cannot hold the stone, and the entire retail tradition of the category is built on a person in a good suit standing across a glass counter from you. Miadora's answer was certification paperwork and a return policy generous enough to hurt.

The competition arrived faster than the customers. Blue Nile and Ashford were funded in the same window, buying the same keywords and discounting against each other on a product that carries real inventory cost sitting in a vault. In February 2000 Miadora bought Jewelry.com, which is the address anyone would type first, and it still was not enough of a moat.

~ the friday ~

The luxury e-tail cohort went down together. Eve.com, the beauty site, closed in the same stretch. Boo.com had already gone in May. The magazine and television advertising that all of these companies had committed to in early 2000 was priced for a market that stopped existing around April, and by autumn the venture money had simply left the room.

Miadora's remains were quiet. There was no auction and no acquirer. The domain drifted through other hands in the years after, and the only durable record of the company is a handful of newspaper business-section pieces from September 2000 and a funding table that adds up to $51.2 million.

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