Natural Wonders

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

~ the last words ~

Natural Wonders began in 1986 out of a shop called Sand and Foam and sold the kind of thing American malls sold for the next fifteen years: telescopes, fossils, crystals, wind chimes, ant farms, globes that talked. Ten stores in California by 1989, thirty six in 1990, eighty eight by 1992, a hundred forty five across thirty six states by the end of 1994. Revenue went from thirty million in the late eighties to a hundred nineteen million in 1993 and about a hundred thirty seven million in 1995. Along the way it fought The Nature Company over the concept and paid that company one point one million dollars to settle.

This category never existed where I grew up. Turkey had malls by the late nineties, and I spent time in them, but a specialty store whose entire inventory was science gifts, where a fourteen year old could stand in front of a Meade telescope for twenty minutes without buying anything, was not a format anybody tried. The Turkish equivalent was a stationery shop with a shelf of globes. Everything I know about Natural Wonders I know from a bankruptcy docket and a screenshot, and the screenshot is the part that tells you what it felt like.

On 11 September 2000 the company signed a fifty million dollar revolving credit line with IBJ Whitehall Retail Finance and a five million dollar term loan with Hilco Capital, and used both to buy World of Science, Inc. for about five and a half million. Ninety seven days later, on 17 December 2000, Natural Wonders and World of Science both filed for Chapter 11 in the Northern District of California, Oakland Division, case number 00-46943, blaming weak holiday sales. The revolver was drawn to thirty one and a half million. Nasdaq suspended the stock the same day and delisted it on 17 January. The company did not appeal.

~ the record ~

~ ten weeks ~

The end moved fast and is documented to the day in the company's own filings. A court order on 5 February 2001 led to a twenty million dollar payment to the lenders on the seventh. On 28 February the Bankruptcy Court authorized Natural Wonders to liquidate its inventory and everything else free and clear of liens through going-out-of-business sales, with the proceeds going to the secured claims until they were paid in full. On 5 March the court approved the bidding procedures for an auction.

Store of Knowledge tried three times in one month to buy the thing. The best of those offers put a hundred thirty seven of the remaining two hundred thirty seven stores under a combined banner. All three bids failed. The last 8-K the company ever filed is dated 22 August 2001 and reports the financial status for July, by which point the registered address had moved from the corporate building on Technology Drive in Fremont to an industrial way in Benicia. The SEC finally revoked the registration on 2 July 2008, seven years after there was anything to register.

~ the page that was never crawled ~

naturalwonders.com was a three-frame set whose home page was mostly a single enormous keywords tag, a few hundred words of merchandise terms stuffed in for search engines back when that worked. The archive has it unchanged on 5 December 2000, twelve days before the filing, and effectively unchanged on 11 June 2001, three months into the liquidation, nav bar still offering the store locator and the events calendar.

Somewhere after that they put up a goodbye, and the Wayback Machine never caught it. The only copy is Steve Baldwin's screenshot: the wordmark in white over a photograph of the Earth, and under it the notice that they were no longer accepting online orders, a number to leave a message on at 1-877-ASK-NATW, and a line that reads "This site will be closed while we transfer the operation to a new owner. Watch this page for future developments of a new www.naturalwonders.com." The copyright at the bottom says 1999, 2000. The new owner never showed up.

~ what moved into the address ~

By September 2003 the domain belonged to a popunder farm. The page is a JavaScript trap that tries to set itself as your home page and opens a ClickBank affiliate survey behind your window, and the keywords tag is the horrible part. Whoever built it kept the dead store's actual inventory words, Meade telescope and Woodstock chimes and galileo thermometers and ant farm and fossils, and interleaved them with hydrocodone and xanax and diet pills and porn. Fifteen years of teaching search engines what Natural Wonders sold, and the squatter kept every word of it. The same page carries a robots tag set to noarchive, which is a site asking not to be remembered while standing on a grave.

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