MVP.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

in 2000 i was a teenager in Ankara on a dial-up line, and i bought nothing online. there was nothing to buy, not from where i sat. mvp.com was an American store that would not have shipped to me even if i had a card to pay with. i am writing it down because of who stood behind it, not because it ever came near Turkey.

the whole pitch was athlete star power. Michael Jordan and John Elway put their names on the front of an online sporting-goods store, and Wayne Gretzky was the third face on the masthead. Benchmark Capital and Freeman Spogli poured in sixty-five million dollars. on top of that sat an eighty-five million dollar advertising alliance with CBS and its SportsLine unit. for a company selling running shoes and tennis rackets over a modem, that was a lot of runway.

it launched in the back half of 1999 and never found the volume. by December 2000 half the staff was gone and the offices in Boulder and Austin had closed. in February 2001 SportsLine terminated the deal over a late five-million-dollar payment, and what was left of mvp.com, the domain and the trademarks, went to SportsLine itself. the whole thing lasted about fourteen months.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

the theory in 1999 was that a famous enough face could sell anything on the web. Jordan sold shoes in the physical world by the billions, so Jordan would sell them online too. what the theory missed was that a banner with a champion on it does not fix thin margins or a customer who can walk into a real store and try the shoe on. the athletes were investors and spokesmen, not operators, and the operators ran out of road.

~ what remains ~

mvp.com is a footnote in the dot-com crash now, filed next to Pets.com and Webvan as proof that a big launch and a bigger marketing budget were not a business. the difference is the faces. most of the flameouts that year were unknown startups with sock puppets or grocery vans. this one had hall of famers on the letterhead, and it still could not clear a warehouse of sports gear before the money ran out.

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