Red Rocket

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

~ the obituary ~

Red Rocket started as something more serious than it ended up. The oldest surviving capture, from 9 January 1998, carries the title "Red Rocket: the online learning store for kids" and a browse page stacked with the kind of credentials a parent reads before spending money: Caldecott and Newbery medals alongside a Dr. Toy award. The vendors were Brio and Creativity for Kids. It was an educational toy store that happened to be on the web.

By 1999 Viacom had put Nickelodeon on top of it. The title became "Welcome to Red Rocket: The Internet's Smartest Toy Store," the logo gained a slime-green starburst and the words "powered by Nickelodeon," and the tagline underneath read The Stuff Kids Want! You can watch the whole repositioning happen in the markup. The shopping cart header image on the 1999 home page is called shopcart_header_flooz.gif, which means Red Rocket accepted Flooz, the emailable gift currency fronted by Whoopi Goldberg that died a year and a half after this did.

Spring 2000 killed the online toy business as a category. Toysmart and ToyTime both went down in the same few weeks Red Rocket did. The ones that lived were the ones attached to a chain with warehouses, which is why Toys R Us ended up buying the carcass rather than competing with it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it sold ~

The catalog was organized the way a bookstore organizes a children's section rather than the way a toy store does. You could browse by age band, with separate gateways running from zero to two all the way up to nine to twelve. You could browse by award, which is an unusual thing to offer on a commerce site and tells you exactly who the buyer was understood to be. The customer service directory had a vendor page with a logo for every manufacturer it stocked, which in 1998 was how you signaled that you were a real store and not two people with a credit card gateway.

~ the day it died ~

The shutdown notice is one of the cleanest primary sources in this whole category, because Viacom did not put it on redrocket.com. It put it on nick.com, at /notice/index.html, and made the toy store's own domain redirect there. The Internet Archive caught the redirect firing at 10:45:12 GMT on 10 May 2000 and caught the notice itself the following day. The page is a table, 530 pixels wide, with the logo at the top and five short lines under a horizontal rule:

Red Rocket is closing operations effective 4PM EST. May 5, 2000. If you have already placed an order it will be fulfilled by Wednesday May 10, 2000. If you have any questions about your order please call (888) 794-8080 or e-mail [email protected]. Thank you for your patronage. Red Rocket

A month later Toysrus.com bought Red Rocket's remaining inventory from Viacom, and the two companies set up a Nickelodeon boutique on the Toys R Us site to carry the licensed products that Red Rocket had been selling directly. Viacom went on earning from the brand off somebody else's shelf.

~ the funny part ~

I was not the customer for this and neither was anyone I knew. In 2000 the Turkish way to buy a child a toy involved walking somewhere, and the idea of a web site that would ship a Brio train set to your house was not a thing that had a local equivalent to be jealous of. What reaches me about Red Rocket is not the store, it is the shape of the ending: a media company with a cable channel and a famous orange splat decided its toy store was a rounding error, wrote six sentences and pointed the domain somewhere else before the end of the week.

The only surviving picture of the Red Rocket logo at full size, as far as I can find, is a screenshot somebody took of that closing notice and filed in a museum of failed websites. The brand is preserved inside its own death certificate.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »