Svpply

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

~ the eulogy ~

Svpply came out of new york in 2010, made by ben pieratt, and it tried to put the feeling of window-shopping online. You saved the products you wanted to own, other people saved theirs, and you followed the ones whose taste you trusted. The result was a clean feed of objects, wanted rather than bought, closer to a wishlist you kept in public than to a store. It was invite-only at the start, which gave it the small careful community that people remember.

That was enough to get noticed. In september 2012 ebay bought it. The plan was never really to grow svpply on its own; ebay wanted the mechanics, the saving and the collecting and the personalized feed, and it wired those ideas into ebay's own feed and collections. Svpply itself kept running quietly in the background while its ideas moved into a much bigger house.

Svpply was a shopping site for people who cared how the shopping itself looked, and that was not me. i read about it the way i read about polyvore and the rest of that curated-commerce wave: a design-forward corner of the american web that never had a turkish edition and never needed one. The interesting part is the ending, which is the most ordinary ending there is. A bigger company bought it for the parts and closed the rest.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

The thing svpply understood early is that shopping online is mostly not buying. It is looking, saving, wanting, coming back. It built for that middle state instead of the checkout, and it let taste travel between people the way a good shop window pulls a crowd. Pinterest would do a broader version of the same instinct and get enormous. Svpply stayed narrow and stayed about things you could own.

~ the actual end ~

Two years after the deal, on 31 august 2014, ebay switched svpply off, a week short of the acquisition's anniversary. There was nothing dramatic in it. The features had already been absorbed, and the standalone site was surplus. Acquisitions like this end quietly because the useful part left long before the shell did.

~ the long tail ~

The part worth remembering is what happened next. Within about forty hours of the shutdown news, ben pieratt put up a kickstarter for very goods, a rebuild of the svpply experience for the community that missed it. People wanting the dead thing back badly enough to fund its replacement in under two days is the clearest verdict there is on what got closed.

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