Toilet paper pokes fun at dot-com bottom
Published: 20 Aug 2001 13:31 BST
Two entrepreneurs have created a line of novelty toilet paper printed to look like ticker tape spewing off the stock prices of struggling dot-coms. Publicly traded companies like Yahoo!, Amazon.com and BroadVision are among the stocks that landed on the company's "roll of shame." All three have severely plummeted from their all-time highs.
"We picked out some real dogs," said John Zappa, a co-creator of the toilet paper.
The demand for memorabilia of failed Internet companies is becoming a cottage industry at a time when the Nasdaq Stock Market is submerged below 2,000.
Stock certificates from struggling or failed Web companies are selling for far more than their paper value -- more than $100 for certificates from the now-defunct Webvan and the struggling Drkoop.com, whose stock trades around 11 cents.
T-shirts, jackets, cup holders and mouse pads bearing the logos of one-time household names like eToys and Kozmo are also fetching big money on eBay. The New Economy's fall is happening as fast as its rise, and it seems people want souvenirs before it is completely gone.
"Buyers usually fall into two categories: those who lost money investing and who can laugh at themselves, or someone who knows somebody who lost and buys the toilet paper to rub their nose in it," said Zappa, who playfully calls his rolls of $9.95 toilet paper "Venture Crapital" and is toying with such marketing slogans as "No hype and all wipe" and, somehow capturing the je ne sais quoi of the Internet age: "Let's potty like its 1999." The toilet paper is not yet available in the UK.
Demand for the toilet paper is coming from surprising places, Zappa said. Someone at investment bank Morgan Stanley, which has taken its hits on Internet investments, ordered 24 rolls to hand out to clients as gifts.
The downturn also created a voracious market for Web sites about the sluggish economy and its impact. They range from such gossipy sites as the popular FuckedCompany, which gleefully takes pot shots at the suddenly downsized, to those with a more serious bent, like Startupfailures.com . The latter site, created by someone who has two failures under his belt, caters to those who also have failed in their start-up ventures.
Aside from the schadenfreude from Old Economy -- and suddenly reformed New Economy -- types who say they always knew it couldn't last, the Internet in general has become a favorite whipping dog, the subject of stifled giggles and rolled eyes.
These days, anything serious seems to be out of place. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to take a poll -- and to publish two columns' worth of material -- as to whether the paper should change the name of a column from "Boom Town" to something more, er, appropriate, like "Gloom Town" or "Ka-Boom Town."
But as the hearty laughs are heard from Boston to Seattle, some dot-com defenders have emerged, calling the ridicule gratuitous and unfair. Meanwhile, at least one analyst said the run on buying Internet memorabilia may be due to sentimentality.
Companies spent millions cozying up to the public, and many people may have grown attached, Gomez analyst Alan Alper said.
"A lot of the Internet boom was based on hopeful and wishful thinking," Alper said. "A lot of the people involved wanted to help build castles in the sky, and there were also a lot who wanted to live there."
Zappa and Wentz got the idea for the toilet paper after working for Dell Computer, which is not one of the companies on the roll. Zappa said the two bonded over their common disbelief of the Internet craze going on around them.
The pair say they stood out from their peers, who were making a killing by investing in dot-com stocks.
"Chris and I were the lepers of the village at Dell because all our co-workers wanted was to hear how great they were for buying Amazon and Priceline," Zappa said. "They used to say we didn't know what we were talking about. The toilet paper was a kind of a 'Revenge of the Nerds' thing."
Through their business, Rothwell-Gornt, which develops and markets intellectual property, Zappa and Wentz have sold more than 300 rolls and are scurrying to fill 2,500 orders. They say they are negotiating deals with national retail chains that specialise in novelty gifts.
Although the New York Post called the duo "pessimists," Zappa, who said the late musician and social commentator Frank Zappa was a second cousin, says the toilet paper is all in good fun.
"It's not my intention to hurt anybody, but I'm a realist," Zappa said. "It was an insult to my intelligence to see those companies bid up to billion-dollar valuations without any profits. It was only natural that they would go out of business."
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