Wallpocketts: Why Wal-Mart is bad for your business
Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 2:11 pmLast night I watched a two hour program on CNBC named The Age of Wal-Mart, a decently two (three? four?) sided view on one of the world’s largest companies. It was originally aired in 2004, I believe.
Well, one of the groups featured was a tiny little startup called Wallpocketts: little pieces of material that stuck to the wall and provided a pocket you could stuff light items in… photos, receipts, cards, CDs, pretty much anything like that.
Through-out the program, you got to see the saga of them trying to get Wal-Mart to carry their product. At the end, Wal-mart finally decides to carry their product, and they’re beyond happy. Except one little problem: I googled their domain, and they’re no longer around. I don’t know what happened, but I’m pretty sure of one thing… Wal-mart eventually back-stabbed them.
I remember watching this show thinking, “What a worthless product.”. Where is the utility? Where is the need? It’s sad that they had to spend extra money to satisfy Wal-Mart when it was obvious the product would fail. They would have been much better off if Wal-Mart had just been up front with them and told them that. The couple put on a brave face and tried the make the product sound exciting, when it was anything but. It was just another worthless thing for people to spend hard earned money on when they should be buying food and housing and transportation.
yeah their site is up and they looked so happy on the show, especially if you watch the credits…lets stop assuming negative things all the time…
wallpocketts.com sucks their website is horrible and can barely be found on google……. who the F searches for wallpocketts anyways
Saw the show. They were free to choose and decided to sell through Walmart and not approach the hundreds of thousands of mom and pop stores across the country.
Seems like Walmart provided them an opportunity and option they might otherwise not have had.
If they are gone from Walmart, I guess the American consumers, who are also free to choose, did not appreciate their product.
Saw the same show yesterday 1/18/09. It appears that the 700 store test might not have met WalMart’s minimum sales expectations for it to be a success and continue carrying the line. The product might have been cut immediately and all unsold merchandise would have been shipped back to the vendor (freight collect?)or liquidated. By the way, I think I heard on the show that WalMart also had the vendor cut his msrp to 50% of what he had planned, made him redesign and resize his product line. This probably cost him alot of extra money. Wonder if he is still happy that he ever got the order in the first place??!!
Their website was down for months.
But there is one thing, I don’t see their product anywhere in Walmart.
The wallpocketts website is up and running. Looks like the backstabbing didn’t happen, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about. http://www.wallpocketts.com/ This website works fine as of Nov15/2008 (today). Thanks!