nARTBOX (엔아트박스)

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

~ the last words ~

Artbox is a Korean stationery chain. Pencil cases and small plastic things with faces on them, the sort of shop a fourteen year old spends an hour in after school. Around 2000 it did what a surprising number of retailers did that decade and built a website that had almost nothing to do with retail.

nARTBOX was an e-card site. You picked one of the company's own characters and sent an animated greeting to a friend's email address, with a short message set under it. Around the card engine sat Flash games and personality quizzes. There was a character avatar service too, running on its own subdomain. The games were as small as the format allowed, including one where two characters throw things at each other and the ammunition is rubber shoes.

The crawl history tells the shape of the thing. Eight captures in 2000, and then 276 in 2005, which is the archive's way of saying the site had become worth visiting. After 2007 the number falls every year.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The e-card was a real product category for about a decade and it is almost impossible to explain now. Email was text. Sending someone something that moved required either an attachment they would not open or a link to a site that would play it for them, and the whole business of Blue Mountain and its imitators was being that site. A stationery company had an obvious reason to be in it, since the thing it already sold was paper you write a message on and hand to somebody.

Korea in 2000 to 2007 was also several years ahead of most places on broadband, which meant a site built entirely out of Flash was reasonable there before it was reasonable anywhere else. In Turkey across those same years I was moving from a 56k modem to TTNet broadband, and a page that wanted to load a Flash card engine was a page you decided whether to wait for. The difference is not taste. It is what the line could carry.

~ the fall ~

The card engine is still answering in the archive on 16 April 2010, serving the same frameset around ecard_main.php it had served since the middle of the decade. The next capture of the front page is fifteen months later, on 11 July 2011, and by then nartbox.com is four lines of HTML with a meta refresh pointing at artbox.co.kr. Somewhere in that gap the site was switched off and the domain reassigned to marketing.

Nothing dramatic killed it. Flash was ending, smartphones were arriving, and the reason to send an animated card had been absorbed by messaging apps that could already do animation without asking anyone to open a browser. The category went, not the company.

Type nartbox.com today and you land on poom.co.kr, which is Artbox selling stationery. The redirect has been maintained for fifteen years by a business that has no particular reason to keep it, which is the most affectionate thing in the file.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »