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The Sharper Image files for bankruptcy
Feb 21, 2008
The Sharper Image has filed for bankruptcy. I visited a store a few years ago and wondered who would buy any of those expensive novelties.
One reason they've failed, I think, is because the Internet makes customers better informed. If you can figure out, within a couple of clicks, that a gadget is overpriced and not very well designed, no store environment is going to sell it.
Also, turns out that The Sharper Image was basically an air purifier store: 28 percent of revenue!
Sharper Image was an early seller of air purifiers, which it sold, rather briskly, under the name Ionic Breeze. But in 2005, a Consumer Reports study suggested that the product might be dangerous to users because the purifiers generated small amounts of ozone. Sales plunged. Air purifiers, which accounted for 28 percent of the chain’s sales in 2005, fell to 9.4 percent of sales in 2007.
I know I only went in their store at the MOA to gawk/play with the gadgets. And I don't think I remember ever seeing anyone else in the store actually buy anything, either.
isn't sharper image a free museum of overpriced gadgets? that's how i've always thought of them... :)
They've outlasted their novelty. We now live in the age of cel phones that play tv shows, I-pods that play video, digital recording devices galore. There's nothing unusual about what they do anymore.
They should have remodeled themselves long ago if they were going to stay relevent.
I actually got a $100 gift certificate to Sharper Image for Christmas one year. I was pretty psyched....until I got to the store. I literally could NOT find anything I wanted. Nothing. I literally wondered around the store over and over again and then left. I came back another day and wound up buying my wife an iPod Shuffle for $99, which it turns out, she did not want. I had to return it and I was charged a $15 return fee. After all was said and done, I lost money on the deal. I hate that store and am surprised they lasted this long. Good riddance.