The tech world moves really, really fast, and that means there’s always a few—OK, more than a few—companies that die before they ever get on their feet. We remember them as failed experiments, examples of shortsightedness, and now, as clothing.
Startups
Extinct Startup Tees is a small shop selling a handful of items emblazoned with the logos of business ventures that melted down before their time. From Napster to Color, and MySpace to Grooveshark, these relics will remain in our memories forever so we might as well pay tribute to them.
As cool as these are, and they definitely are cool, the selection is unfortunately limited and quite modest when you consider the number of failed startup ventures there are to choose from.
Here are a few classic collapsed startups that we wouldn’t mind ironically supporting on our T-shirts and hoodies:
Kozmo
Famous for offering to bring your Starbucks order right to your door, Kozmo couldn’t survive the dot com bubble.
Joost
Joost was great at convincing backers that users would be willing to download all the videos they wanted to watch, but couldn’t convince users to actually do it.
Friendster
Before Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, there was Friendster. It started the social network craze and then didn’t know what to do with itself.
AltaVista
Once the search engine to beat, AltaVista saw massive growth in the early days of the Web but ultimately couldn’t turn traffic into money.
Pets.com
There’s no escaping the black hole of Pets.com. Exploding in popularity and then imploding under the weight of its own bad decisions, the company is the ultimate example of a good idea gone wrong.
Still, that silly sock puppet would look great on the front of a hoodie.
Photo via pasa47/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)