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A Pilgrimage to SkyMall

Who could ever have predicted that the church of SkyMall would grow so deep, so bizarre? When the company launched back in 1989, it was rooted in pragmatism. Founder Robert Worsley, an accountant, was flipping through the pages of a SkyMall precursor—the Giftmaster catalogue—and was struck by the witless oddity of the products it offered. “It had six-foot-long pencils and fish ties,” Worsley remembers.

Worsley’s scheme was to offer fliers the greatest hits from big name catalog retailers—Land’s End, for instance—and to deliver purchased items with space age efficiency. Customers used those bygone Airphones toll-free to order Skymall goodies they could then pick up at the gate. Worsley stocked warehouses near myriad airports and hired runners to meet SkyMall buyers as they deplaned. He also hyped his own SkyMall product line, selling luggage and sports equipment. It did not go well. By late 1993, SkyMall had 20 trailers in its Phoenix parking lot, each one crammed with spare suitcases and golf bags. It lost $6 million that year.

Worsley radically simplified the company. He dropped his own product line, and also his airport delivery service, and gradually, honing the brand, zeroed in on products that were “early in their life cycle,” as he put it recently. “SkyMall is a great place to expose new ideas—you can introduce whatever you’re selling to people worldwide. All those rolling suitcases—they started on SkyMall and went straight to the mass market.”

By 2001, Worsley was able to sell SkyMall for about $47 million. He now runs Renergy Holdings, which produces wind- and solar energy. Still, he chatted with me that morning in a SkyMall conference room, over speakerphone, as Joey sat nearby, wearing an awed grin.

Worsley talked about SkyMall products he’d bought himself. “For a couple Christmases there,” he said, “my wife knew that it was going to be all SkyMall. We bought a water trampoline that my kids loved, and this great Hot Diggity Dog hot dog cooker. But some of the stuff”—Worsley faltered—“well, it’s like anything you buy at the store. I’ve got some massagers that I’ve rarely used, and also these scalp tongs. They’re supposed to make you relax—you know, they change the biochemistry in your body. But I’m not a big believer in magnets and that sort of thing.”

Worsley doesn’t know where those scalp tongs are now. And thinking about them, I felt a little bit sad. I remembered gizmos and toys I’d gotten for Christmas myself. There were the unfortunate gifts, my own scalp tong equivalents—for instance, an aromatherapy toe bath given with all gracious intent—that never got used before being shuffled off, finally, to the Salvation Army. And then there were the gifts that I really, really wanted, like, say, this orange plastic Smash-up Derby car, replete with flashing lights and detachable plastic doors that exploded off when you slammed the whole unit into a wall.

I got the Smash-up Derby car when I was 8. When I first opened it, ripping into the crinkly cellophane, I was so excited. Then, a couple weeks later, of course, the car broke (or maybe I got bored with it; I can’t remember). It ended up in our garage, and a vague disappointment seeped into me as I realized that, actually, the car was not going to make my life magic. My enchantment with stuff—consumer goods, whatever you want to call them—dimmed a little bit.

That dimming was my own thing, maybe, but nationwide, amid the recession, Americans are buying stuff less these days. Two companies that sell SkyMall-ish gadgetry—among them Sharper Image and Circuit City—have both died recently, after long, illustrious runs.

SkyMall laid off 26 employees in January 2009, and last year its first quarter catalog sales were down about 15 percent relative to 2008. You have to wonder how the company will fare as consumers keep reining in their buying habits—and shirking cool gizmos that might end up languishing in their garages. Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, has decreed, “The world of shopping will change more in the next three years than it did in the last 50.” He argues that retailers now need to be more pointed in their appeals to consumers. “When SkyMall puts a catalog in first class,” he told me, “it should be different than the one it puts in coach. Right now they’re trying to be all things to all people. They’re in danger of becoming antiquated.”

By Joey’s lights, guys like Paco Underhill just don’t get it, for SkyMall is in possession of what Joey calls a “secret sauce,” a certain je ne sais quoi that guides its marketing experts as they pluck novel, almost unheard-of items from the wilderness of consumer culture.

How does SkyMall decide what goes into its catalogs? Joey wouldn’t say. He noted that it gets other catalog companies—Hammacher Schlemmer, for instance, and Brookstone—to buy space to push their top-selling products. He also pointed to a towering black file cabinet housing a few years’ worth of 100-odd catalogs. SkyMall’s eight merchandisers turn to these magazines often, and they also haunt trade shows and comb through zillions of pitch letters from inventors eager to get into the pages of SkyMall. The merchandising department holds regular product review meetings. But would they ever let a reporter sit in?

“I’d really like to make that happen,” said Joey, “but—well, that’s our secret sauce.”

He agreed to an alternative tack: a mock review session, at which SkyMall’s marketing chiefs—Bill McCoy and Barb Downey—considered links to ads for 13 strange products not currently on SkyMall. The first item was a RoadPro travel crockpot.

“Oh,” said Downey as the device appeared on her screen. “It’s a crockpot that plugs into your cigarette lighter. We should seriously consider it.”

“But who’s going to use this?” said McCoy. “Our customers are yuppies. I can’t see an executive cooking his dinner in this as he drives to the Marriott.”

It seemed McCoy was just being grumpy, but a theme emerged as we looked at the Nappak, an inflatable air mattress with its own inflatable side wall and ceiling. “It might be good for a street person,” McCoy said, “but our customers can usually find a bed. They rarely get stranded.”

“They’re not big campers,” said Downey.

Soon, they looked at a “pocket safe,” a computer flash drive designed to store vital personal documents—health records, for instance, and insurance data. A sleek pin pad enabled encryption. “Twenty- and thirty-somethings would get how this works,” Downey said, “but they haven’t accumulated enough records yet to need it. It’s a product for older people—and they wouldn’t know how to use it.”

“It’s a solution without a customer base,” said McCoy.

The USB air-conditioned shirt is a white short sleeve garment with a small side-panel fan that plugs into a computer. It seemed poised to tap into the same whimsy that has made adult footsie pajamas a hot SkyMall product. But once again the merchandisers invoked the commonsense reserve that yields SkyMall its ineffable magic.

“You have to unplug it to get up and go to the printer?” Downey said, vaguely incredulous. “I vote no.”

“It’s a geek shirt,” said McCoy. “It wouldn’t sell.”

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