After reading How The Internet Happened, I’ve been thinking a lot about the dot-com bubble and all the “thing-we-sell dot com” sites that popped up during this time.
For example, if someone wanted to get rich selling spatulas they wouldn’t open a spatula warehouse, but rather create Spatulas.com. The site would get $15 million in venture capital and lose $7 with every spatula sold. There’d be an IPO sale and shortly thereafter the Spatula.com creators would cash out and become millionaires. Spatula.com would be dead by 1998. That was the dot-com bubble in a nutshell.
Speaking of nutshells.
I’ve been ordering from Nuts.com for years. Their selection of nuts is unsurprisingly excellent, but what keeps me coming back is their dried fruit, which is much better than the offerings at my local grocery store.
Because of the book, I actually thought about the company I had ordered from so many times, for the first time. It’s rare to see a “thing-we-sell dot com” brand these days, so I wondered: are they a rare, unchanged survivor from the mid-90s boom? The “our family’s been going nuts since 1929” phrase on the box told me obviously not.
I did some digging and learned that the company was founded in 1929, as Newark Nut Company. They changed the name in 1999 to Nutsonline.com and finally to Nuts.com in 2011. This was a costly move.
Personally I think Nutsonline and Nuts.com are both pretty sweet site names, but I appreciate the switch to something more 90s than the name they actually picked in the 90s.
Anyway I’m excited to have all this completely useless context and history top of mind next time I place an order for dried mango.
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