Piperlime

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

~ the obit ~

Piperlime is not a word. Somebody was paid to arrive at it, and that is the most informative fact about the whole venture, because it tells you the brand existed before the business did. Gap wanted a property that did not read as Gap, and the first deliverable in that kind of project is always a name that sounds like it came out of a garage.

It launched in 2006 selling shoes and handbags with no stores behind it at all. The reason was Zappos, which by then had proved that people would buy footwear they had never tried on, having built a business out of free returns that made the risk somebody else's problem. Gap already had the warehouses and the buying power. What it did not have was any intention of letting a company in Nevada own that behavior, so it went and made its own version.

The range widened over the years. Womenswear arrived in fall 2009 and menswear came and then went again by August 2014. There was a Piperlime house label by then, shelved next to designer stock from names like Rebecca Minkoff and Kate Spade. What it never got was a reason for existing separately that a customer could have explained to you.

Piperlime shipped inside the United States and that is where the story ends from where I was sitting. In 2006 the live question in Turkey was not which website to buy shoes from, it was whether you were going to type a card number into a website at all, which is why cash on delivery survived here years longer than anyone building these things in San Francisco would have believed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually sold ~

The product idea was editing. Piperlime ran a guest program where celebrity stylists were installed as fashion editors and picked the seasonal front page, with Rachel Zoe and Olivia Palermo among the names that took a turn. You were not buying access to inventory, because most of the inventory was available in ten other places. You were buying somebody's opinion about which four things out of it were the right ones.

That is a real business when it works, and it is a fragile one, because the merchandise belongs to other people and so does the taste. Piperlime was renting both halves. When a stylist moved on, the only thing that stayed was a shop full of goods you could get from the brands directly, with an invented name over the door.

~ the store ~

On 6 September 2012 Piperlime opened a physical flagship in SoHo. An online-only brand, created specifically to demonstrate that a retailer no longer needed shops, signed a lease in the most expensive shopping district in New York six years into its life.

The stated logic was brand building and it was probably even true. The uncomfortable reading is the one the numbers support: the venture could not get itself noticed on the internet, where it lived, so it went and bought attention in the physical world instead. Nothing about the trajectory afterwards suggests it worked.

~ the day it died ~

Gap Inc. announced the closure on 23 January 2015. Piperlime was the smallest brand in the portfolio at under $100 million a year, which against a parent turning over more than $16 billion is a rounding error with a payroll. The online platform and the SoHo store were both to be gone by the end of the first quarter of the fiscal year, which meant the end of April.

The quote in the release belongs to Art Peck, described in it as incoming chief executive, who formally took the job a week later. Closing the smallest thing your predecessor built is a cheap first move and a clarifying one. Gap was cutting back to the labels people can name.

piperlime.com is still registered and still answers. It sends you to gap.com, which means the brand invented to not look like Gap now functions as a redirect to Gap, and has done for longer than it was ever a shop.

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