Sometimes, the arrogance of youth is no joke…and no, that is not in reference to the two servings of Easy Mac that I just inhaled at 8 a.m. Australian startup Ship Your Enemies Glitter, a service that offered to send “the herpes of the crafts world” to anyone in the world with an attached note for only ten Aussie dollars, went viral and subsequently imploded in the space of 48 hours. What happened?
The sole proprietor of Ship Your Enemies Glitter, a 22-year-old Australian by the name of Mathew Carpenter posted this update to Twitter after the site had been live for less than 24 hours:
ShipYourEnemiesGlitter with 1m visits, 270k social shares, $xx,xxx in sales, tonnes of people wanting to order. 24 hours old. For sale.
— Mathew Carpenter (@matcarpenter) January 14, 2015
In spite of his age, Carpenter has already spearheaded a number of other startup efforts (a special favorite is D**k Pic of the Week), but the rate at which the glitter bombing service came into the public consciousness proved to be too much. After the site had crashed multiple times, Carpenter had begun to implore buyers to stop using the service on Product Hunt, where it had originally been discovered.
“Hi guys, I’m the founder of this website. Please stop buying this horrible glitter product – I’m sick of dealing with it. Sincerely, Mat,” he wrote.
The Ship Your Enemies Glitter site is still live, but if you were holding off on sending an envelope full of the stuff to a hated coworker then you might want to start looking into rhinoceros poop, as all purchases have been suspended. As of now, Carpenter is working through the glitter orders and personally sending each one, an undertaking that must be filled for thousands of purchases.
While it’s easy to make a profit on glitter, Carpenter’s brainchild has backfired if only because he’s doomed to be covered in the stuff for the next couple of weeks. It was nice while it lasted, SYEG, and can someone get this guy a copywriting award for the phrase “vomit up a tonne of glitter?”
RIP.
[h/t Fast Company]
