Microspot

» see microspot.ch as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There is a photograph on Wikimedia Commons of a laptop with an Intel 386 inside it and the word Microspot on the case. That is the part of this company almost nobody remembers, because the brand that died in 2024 was a website, and the thing that carried the name first was a Swiss electronics retailer that put its own badge on computers.

Microspot AG was founded in 1980 by Bruno Gideon, who lived from 1931 to 2015 and does not otherwise appear in this story. In 1996 the company was pulled into Simeco, a Coop subsidiary that already held Interdiscount, and in 1999 every Microspot branch was absorbed into the Interdiscount chain. The two companies formally merged the following year. At that point the name was a trademark sitting in a drawer at a supermarket group.

Coop took it back out in May 2007 and hung it on a home electronics web shop, with the stated intention of becoming the market leader in Swiss online consumer electronics. For most of the next seventeen years that was a reasonable ambition rather than a boast. By 2013 the site was inside the ten highest-turnover consumer web shops in the country and it stayed there.

~ the case file ~

~ the first death ~

The 1999 absorption is worth pausing on, because it is the same move that killed the brand a second time twenty five years later. Coop owned two electronics retailers. It decided one storefront was enough, kept the one with more shops behind it and stopped using the other name.

What survived was the trademark and whatever goodwill it carried, which turned out to be enough to build on eight years later. That is rarer than it sounds. Most retail names that get folded into a sibling never come back, and the ones that do usually come back as a nostalgia exercise rather than as a working business doing hundreds of millions.

~ the second life ~

The online Microspot was a serious operation. A showroom opened at Moosseedorf in August 2011 and another at Zurich main station in April 2016, a thirty square meter box where you could at least buy a printer cable in person. Orders could be collected at 450 Coop pickup points around the country. In May 2018 an automated small parts warehouse went up at Jegenstorf, shared with Interdiscount, and automated packing was added in 2020.

At the end of 2018 it swallowed a corpse. Siroop, the Coop and Swisscom marketplace joint venture, went offline and was fed into microspot.ch piece by piece. From then on the plan was to turn Microspot into a real marketplace with third-party sellers, aimed squarely at Digitec Galaxus, which belongs to Coop's oldest rival Migros. The Swiss online electronics war was two supermarket groups fighting each other with web shops.

The revenue figure for 2020 was 334 million francs. That was the high point, and it is also roughly when the marketplace ambition ran out of road.

~ the arithmetic afterward ~

On 11 October 2023 Coop announced that microspot.ch would be merged into interdiscount.ch over the following months and the Microspot brand withdrawn. The announcement was unusually humane about people: staff were offered jobs, and Interdiscount took on every open order along with the warranty and repair obligations. The merge itself happened in spring 2024. Today microspot.ch is a redirect to interdiscount.ch, and the destination page does not mention Microspot once.

Then the numbers arrived. Interdiscount had reported 954 million francs for 2023 with Microspot inside it, of which roughly 254 million was Microspot. For 2024, Interdiscount on its own reported 772 million. More than two thirds of the Microspot business did not move to the sibling shop at all. It walked over to Digitec and Brack, which is the risk every retailer takes when it decides that two of its own names are one too many.

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