Zappos
Est. 1999Nick Swinmurn sold shoes he didn't own — photographing them in local stores, and buying each pair at retail only after someone ordered.
▶ ZAPPOS · 1999ZAPPOS · now ◀Drag the handle — Zappos, 1999 → now.
The ugly part. Frustrated he couldn't find the shoes he wanted at the mall, Nick Swinmurn built the cheapest possible test in 1999. He walked into local shoe stores, asked to photograph their inventory, and posted the pictures on a bare site called ShoeSite.com. There was no warehouse and no stock.
What he faked. When an order came in, he drove back to the store, bought the shoes at full retail, and mailed them himself — often losing money. The point was never profit; it was to learn whether anyone would buy shoes online at all, before committing a cent to inventory. They would.
Now. Renamed Zappos, it grew into a billion-dollar shoe retailer famous for service, and Amazon acquired it for about $1.2 billion in 2009 — from a guy faking a shoe store one photo at a time.