Retail: The Final Frontier?

Eleven years later, The Sharper Image, the high-tech gadgets retailer founded as a catalog in 1977 and built into a store chain, met a similar fate. Although The Sharper Image’s life as a cataloger/retailer was considerably shorter, its fate was similar.

Rapidly growing and highly profitable when its focus was on marketing products directly to consumers through its innovative catalogs, an aggressive strategy of retail expansion led to The Sharper Image’s downfall. The company at one point operated 186 retail stores nationwide.