BewitchedBy: They Were Here Before Etsy And Jezebel, And They’ll Be Here After, Dammit!
AS TOLD BY KRISTY OSLYN: Back when NoLibs was still Northern Liberties. Before your mom talked about Flickr and Facebook. We got to thinkin’ we could do a site about some of our favorite things. A site about a dress we found that we loved, stationery made for the post, a new makeup discovery that could make you look like French cinema in the 1960’s, a soap that smelled like you just drifted through a backyard and picked up the magic scent of honeysuckle . . . And it was just that, a little of everything and a few interviews with some amazing people we’ve met along the way, all on a pretty in pink website. We had some limited fanfare (we were big in Japan!! Okay. We had a few hits from Japan) and the small glory of a khyber party and the occasional local media inquiry. Oh, and we had free ads on Rollingstone.com which got us a lot more traffic than we’d ever expected.
Ready to refine our site and adapt it some as it chugged forward, we underwent a redesign, which turned into the “Top Gun” scene where we lose Goose and even Iceman feels bad about it. We realized our site was woefully hard to update for a bunch of marketing and editorial types and we had lives and jobs. People decided to do things like move, marry the love of their life, and one person (who never has her mind too far from fashion) decided the best pants were smart pants and
is getting a masters at UPenn. So time slipped away and we sometimes still dream of a Bewitchedby blog — a pleasant post as the thought grabs you, not an FTP push into this directory or that. Currently accepting inquiries from ambitious types who want to build us a CSS template thing for Wordpress and/or venture capitalists who trust we’re clever enough to bewitch again.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
wasn’t BewitchedBy an affiliate marketing site? as in, didn’t you make money off of transactions made when people clicked through to the online stores selling your “favorite things,” whether or not the transaction was made the same day they clicked through? i’m all for finding ways to make money off a website — it’s not easy. but full disclosure is also nice.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
IN FULL DISCLOSURE: Bewitchedby.com attempted to run on an rev share business model. But as we tended to go for editorial integrity over business (i.e. we didn’t just link to shit that would make us money) we probably made enough to cover about 1/3 of our costs. The rest of the money came out of pocket. It was a labor of love, plain and simple. We had (still have) all kinds of top secret plans for how we could have made(still might?) money off our lovely site, you know…make it a full time gig.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I’m wondering what “full disclosure” means. Full disclosure on this site? full disclosure on the bewitchedby site? also, not sure why full disclosure is needed.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
I guess Jen O is just trying to imply that we didn’t have any editorial integrity.
August 27th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
:)
August 27th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Speaking of “full disclosure”…do you think the CDNOW employee that was giving away company secrets on the Yahoo! Finance Message boards fully disclosed their name? :)
August 27th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
smiley faces are nice! :)