Member-only story
Where Are They Now
Whatever Happened to SkyMall?
The beloved airline catalog actually beat Amazon to e-commerce, until things fell apart
Where Are They Now is a column that revisits once-popular companies and brands that have seemingly disappeared.
Weirder than Sharper Image, more upscale than Lillian Vernon, the loopy bazaar of SkyMall once entertained bored airplane travelers with items like pierogi Christmas ornaments, a thousand-dollar flying-saucer “Serenity Cat Pod,” and unexpected lawn statues like an extremely chill gargoyle.
At the turn of the millennium, the catalog reached millions of travelers — with airlines getting either a cut of revenues or a monthly fee to place it in seatback pockets — and totaled annual revenues over $80 million. Its first website went up in 1996, when Steve Jobs told Wired that e-commerce was two years away from being huge and Amazon was a year-old online bookstore. For a period in late 1998, it had a market cap of $400 million and was the most active stock on the Nasdaq. But the dot-com bust knocked it back to the old economy, revenues flattened, and the better digital devices got the more competition it had for distraction — another story about the death of print in the internet era.
In 1989, Bob Worsley, a Brigham Young-educated accountant and veteran of PriceWaterhouse, wanted to build something like Amazon Prime for frequent flyers. On an Alaska Airlines flight, he picked up a little merchandise catalog in the seatback pocket, noticed how clunky it was to order from — you had to mail a check and wait over a month for delivery — and thought it could be greatly improved upon. His concept: You’d order something from SkyMall on your Airphone, and it would meet you within 30 minutes when you landed. That model quickly failed: Travelers didn’t have much room for extra stuff, and the logistics were a nightmare.
So Worsley pivoted to the lower-overhead model of drop-shipping. Vendors paid SkyMall for its captive…
