How the Woot was lost: Shoddy Goods 052

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Wow! It’s been a year since I started Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. It happens to coincide with a couple of other significant anniversaries in my career. I guess it’s put me in a reflective mood, so this issue isn’t so much “from Meh” as from me, Jason Toon, and about me.

One time I worked for a weird little online store. We did everything the opposite of what you’re supposed to do to succeed in ecommerce. And we sold a lot of stuff and customers loved us.

Along came the world’s biggest ecommerce behemoth. They bought us up, fixed all our flaws, and did their best to teach us to do everything just like they did. And we flopped. Customers stopped caring. We stopped getting buzz. Going normal killed us.

And then it all happened again, to another weird little company I worked for, on the other side of the world.


Who just reflexively started hitting F5?

The terrible idea that changed my life

“How long will that last? Six months?” That was my reaction in 2004, when my friend Dave Rutledge told me he was leaving his steady agency job to help his brother Matt run an online store that sold one thing a day. The idea just didn’t make any sense. How could you possibly make enough money to stay in business? And every sale launched at midnight! What kind of weirdos would stay up until midnight just to see one new deal?

I was an idiot. Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to wise up. The site launched this month 21 years ago and was a hit from the beginning. Dave soon invited me along to Woot as a copywriter. For my very first piece - I think it was for a blender? - I wrote what I thought was a wacky little blurb and submitted it. Matt sent it back saying it was fine or whatever, but too positive and not weird enough.

That’s when I knew I was home.

Woot did everything “wrong” and it all worked brilliantly. Our audience was extremely tech-savvy, but we specialized in closeouts, a generation or two old. Our prices were so far below the lowest in the market that we left margin on the table, but it got people talking. Our product copy freely admitted the product’s flaws, went off on ridiculous comic tangents, even told people not to buy it. They bought it anyway.


Everything they teach copywriters not to do

In this pre-social media age, our forums blossomed into a raucous, smart, funny, creative community. Our fans were so rabid, we were able to throw together scraps in something called the Bag 'o Crap, and to sell them so fast that we had to add extra servers to handle the load. Wooters developed a whole bunch of elaborate strategies for nabbing a BOC and still mostly missed out: there just wasn’t enough crap to satisfy everybody.;

Woot turned up in places like NPR and Time Magazine and, in a personal career highlight, a joke on RiffTrax (by the ex-MST3K guys). People at the Consumer Electronics Show asked us for autographs. It was an absolute blast, the only dream job I’ve ever had.

Then, in 2010, Amazon bought Woot. The promise was the same as every other acquisition: “you guys are great but now you’ll have the resources to do your thing bigger and better!” At first, there was some truth to it. Some of us had to move to Seattle. We were indeed able to hire a bunch more people, including a brilliant team of comedy writers and community managers it was my privilege to work with. (That team could be the subject of a whole newsletter itself. Or a five-season streaming TV series. Not on network TV, though, too much profanity.) They even built us a sweet little video studio.

But it soon became clear that Amazon thought that Woot’s eccentricities were a flaw to be tamed, not an advantage to be nurtured. I spent more and more emotional energy on arguments over content that would have been uncontroversial in the pre-Amazon days. A few years after I left in 2013, that team of writers was eventually turfed out. Some of the superficial forms of the old Woot persist to this day, but hollowed-out, defanged, normalized. Woot became the Amazon system’s designated bargain bin/dumping ground under the toothless tagline “Deals and Shenanigans”.

When Woot lost its weird, it also lost its superpower to buy and blast-sell mass quantities of leftover junk - the main reason Amazon bought Woot in the first place. Sadly, most of the stuff that incredibly talented team made is gone or hard to find: the Woot blog and YouTube channel were mostly wiped in recent years.(If anybody out there’s got a stash of old Woot video and audio, name your price.)

Happily, the core of the Woot brain trust regrouped at Meh, which also celebrates its birthday this month. The original crew has now been doing the classic daily deal thing with funny copywriting for longer than they did the original. But you probably know all about that.

To Catch a geek

A few years after I left Woot/Amazon, I got a once-in-a-lifetime offer. An online store in Australia called Catch of the Day was willing to sponsor me for a visa to move there and join their marketing team as the main content guy.

The founders, brothers Gabby and Hezi Leibovich, had started the site in 2006 as a direct Aussie imitation of the early Woot. Turned out the idea worked Down Under, too. They’d since expanded beyond the one daily deal, appropriately dropping “of the Day” to just become Catch. But they still specialized in closeout events at prices so low that, as with Woot, people muttered that their inventory must have fallen off a truck. (Not the case, of course! Woot and Catch both just had amazing buyers who could sniff out deals like pigs find truffles.)

Like Woot, Catch did the opposite of what the big guys would do, and it clicked like crazy. One of those things was getting into ecommerce early and staying ahead: Catch opened a state-of-the-art robot warehouse in 2018, way beyond anything else in Australia at the time.

Of course, Catch wasn’t exactly like Woot. Australia’s a much smaller market, so out of necessity, we had to speak to a wider, more mainstream audience. The Leibovich brothers didn’t have the hardcore geek streak that animated Woot.

But they were every bit as much the mischievous showmen who loved to tweak the smug, puffed-up titans of the industry. Our marketing head, Ryan Gracie, got it, too. So I, my team, and our customers had some fun for a few years, building Catch’s community with ridiculous videos, goofy memes, and proudly cheesy zero-budget trivia giveaways that no other ecommerce company in Australia would ever touch.


Math is hard

Then - stop me if you’ve heard this one before - a retail giant took an interest. The Wesfarmers conglomerate owns the country’s only major hardware chain, only major office-supply chain, and the local versions of both Kmart and Target, which split off from their US parent companies long ago and now dominate Australia’s discount department store field. Australia is a fairly monopolistic market, and Wesfarmers is king of the mountain. They bought Catch in 2019, and again, not much changed… at first.

But Catch was no longer a competitor to the likes of Kmart and Target, but subordinate to them in the Wesfarmers system. Our crack buyers could no longer pursue deals by any means necessary, because there were vendor relationships for Wesfarmers to maintain. When they brought in a longtime Amazon exec to run Catch, the writing was on the wall. (That was right after I left, for the record.)

Without the deal-making drive that made Catch in the first place, it too lost its reason to exist. Customers drifted away. Losses piled up. Wesfarmers finally euthanized what was left of Catch for good this past April.

One of Catch’s longtime competitors says he tried to buy the brand, but Wesfarmers wouldn’t sell it. Apparently, they just wanted Catch out of the marketplace altogether. They kept the robot warehouse, though.

Everything wrong is right again

Hey, look, I’m not complaining. I’ve had way more fun than most people ever have at work. All this upheaval has taken me from my hometown of St. Louis to Seattle and then Melbourne, places I never thought I’d even see, much less live. The friendships I made at these places will last the rest of my life.

It just seems hard to understand. If bratty outsiders can come from nothing and build beloved brands with millions of devoted fans, why can’t the fancy-pants ecommerce professionals at the very least not bungle those brands into oblivion?

I realize that it’s not that they’re evil or stupid. It’s that the appeal of the upstarts goes against all the expertise that made big companies big in the first place. They’re brilliant at what they do: making ecommerce repeatable, predictable, optimized, scalable. The freshness that let Woot and then Catch capture the hearts of customers can’t be predicted or repeated. It can only be optimized so far.

And it might not be scalable, because part of that counterintuitive boldness is going all-in on your audience even at the risk of alienating everyone else. Amazon and Wesfarmers can’t afford to say “maybe we’re not for everyone.” But the problem with “be weird but not too weird” is that it satisfies neither the normals nor the weirdos.

The giants think upstarts succeed in spite of those messy qualities; the rest of us know they succeeded because of them. It’s a bummer what happened to Woot and Catch. The Internet and thus the world are less interesting, less fun, without their irreverent spirit.

But for me, there’s some consolation in knowing that the data can’t know everything - especially what unpredictable, unrepeatable, “wrong” thing human beings will respond to. The big guys can run all the data in the world through the fanciest algorithms ever coded. But when the next Bag o’ Crap comes along, they’ll be just as surprised as the rest of us.


Grandpa, tell us about when the Internet was fun

It’s so weird to realize I’ve been doing the Meh thing years longer than I did the Woot thing at this point. That still feels like a major part of my life—and I also still keep up with friends from that time, several still over at Amazon even. I also check in over there and love seeing something pop up with a little of that weirdness from time-to-time, even if they’re not likely send a team of writers to CES for a week of Worst Awards anytime soon. Got any fond memories of Woot, or other similar stories to Jason’s? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods Chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

More re-tales to astonish: