SkyMall

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

~ the eulogy ~

You had to be sitting in an american seat for skymall to mean anything. Turkish Airlines put Skylife in the pocket, a magazine of photographs of places, and there was nothing beside it offering a life-size garden statue. So this is a grave for something i have read about rather than something i ever thumbed through at cruising altitude. It earns one anyway, because its whole business rested on the thing the internet spent twenty years dismantling, which is captive attention.

It started in 1990 in Phoenix, founded by Bob Worsley, and the original idea was more ambitious than the catalog it turned into. You would order in the air and the goods would be waiting for you on landing. The logistics of that did not work in 1990 and would barely work now, so skymall settled for being an ordinary mail order catalog with an extraordinary shelf: the seat pocket, rented from airlines that took a cut of whatever sold.

At its height it printed around twenty million copies a year and claimed to reach eighty-eight percent of american airline passengers. The website did about eighty and a half million dollars of revenue in 2009. Najafi Companies bought it in 2012, and on 17 may 2013 it was merged into a company called Xhibit Corp, which is the sort of ownership history a business collects on the way down.

~ the dossier ~

~ what was in it ~

The catalog sold objects nobody sets out to buy. A life-size yeti statue for the garden, a litter box disguised as a potted plant. The famous items are famous because they answer questions no one ever asked out loud, and because you met them in a state of mind you are never in anywhere else, which is bored and unable to leave.

By around 2010 the catalog had become a joke that people performed. Passengers photographed pages and posted them, blogs ran roundups of the strangest items, and skymall's own marketing started leaning into it. That is a specific and terminal condition for a retailer. Everyone knows your name and nobody is ordering, and the affection they have for you is the kind reserved for things already understood as ridiculous.

~ how it actually ended ~

On 31 october 2013 the FAA cleared airlines to let passengers use personal electronic devices from gate to gate, and carriers moved within days. The single condition skymall's business depended on, a person strapped into a seat with nothing to look at, stopped existing over one autumn. Revenue fell from 33.7 million dollars in 2013 to 15.8 million across the first nine months of 2014. Xhibit filed for chapter 11 on 22 january 2015.

The assets sold on 1 april 2015 to C&A Marketing for 1.9 million dollars, which is roughly what the brand was worth once you took the seat pocket out of it. The catalog came back in october 2015 as an insert inside United's Hemispheres and then quietly stopped being an inflight thing at all. Skymall.com is still there and still sells novelties, the way a name can outlive the situation that made it work. The situation was the product. Nobody was ever going to buy the yeti at home.

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