ThinkGeek

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

~ the goodbye ~

thinkgeek never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a us-shipping-coded product. for someone in ankara on dial-up in '02 or on ttnet broadband in '06, ordering a tauntaun sleeping bag from a virginia warehouse meant freight that cost more than the item and a customs fee that doubled the freight. i knew the site existed because slashdot ran thinkgeek banners on every page for years, but the closest i got to actually buying anything from them was looking at the bag of holding tote and deciding the math did not work.

thinkgeek launched on august 13, '99 in virginia, founded by willie vadnais, jen frazier, jon sime, and scott smith. it was structured as the e-commerce arm of geeknet, the same company that owned slashdot and sourceforge. the catalog was built around the joke that geeks would buy branded versions of their own subculture. caffeinated everything, including soap and beef jerky. shirts with linux jokes that needed prior context to parse. office toys built around star wars and lord of the rings references. the original tauntaun sleeping bag started as an april fools joke in 2009 and got turned into a real product after enough people emailed asking to preorder.

peak revenue was around $118.9 million in 2012 according to the internet retailer top 500 list. that was a real number for a niche e-commerce shop. by 2014 geeknet was being looked at as an acquisition target by both hot topic and gamestop. gamestop won the bidding with a $140 million offer in june '15. the deal closed on july 17, '15. thinkgeek shirts started appearing on shelves inside gamestop physical stores in late '15 and through '16.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the gamestop end ~

the standalone thinkgeek.com site was shut down in july '19. gamestop posted a blog explaining that the product line was being folded into gamestop.com so they could consolidate logistics into one warehouse and one checkout flow. the explanation was operational, not strategic. inside the company the thinkgeek brand still existed as a category label inside gamestop's store layout, with t-shirt walls and a dedicated section for collectibles.

the physical thinkgeek stores, which had launched in malls during the 2015-2016 expansion, closed in waves through '20 and '21. the last brick-and-mortar locations were shut down by september '21. gamestop was busy fighting its own existential battle through that period and the thinkgeek footprint was an easy cut.

~ what got buried with it ~

thinkgeek had a specific role in the english-speaking internet of the 2000s. it was where the slashdot demographic went to spend money on physical objects that signaled the same identity their forum posts already signaled. the catalog selected by a small editorial team who understood the references and would not stock the wrong kind of star trek shirt. the april fools day product releases were a yearly event that occasionally produced real inventory, like the tauntaun bag and the canned unicorn meat.

the audience that had supported thinkgeek for twenty years was already migrating to etsy and amazon merch by the late 2010s. the brand-curated catalog model was being eaten by the algorithmic everything-store model. gamestop's decision to fold the site was rational in that light. the thing that died was not the inventory, it was the curation that picked the inventory.

credit to Mosfet, who pointed us to the GameStop end.

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