Valleywag: RedEnvelope

Commercial real estate vacancies show no sign of dot-bomb 2.0

Jackson West — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:40:00 PDT

Recent reports from local real estate trackers put the amount of office space relinquished by local companies in the last quarter at the highest it has been since the third quarter of 2002 — 436,933 sq. ft, according to commercial broker CB Richard Ellis, or the equivalent of nearly all the space in the Transamerica pyramid. The East Bay and the South Bay also saw an uptick in vacancies. The bankruptcies of Sharper Image, Pay By Touch, and RedEnvelope helped push up San Francisco's vacancy rate, but South of Market remained an untouched bubble of business leases, thanks to expansion by Monster.com, Advent Software, and Splunk. (Photo by Thierry)

RedEnvelope failure frees up SoMa space

Owen Thomas — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:40:00 PDT

The likely closure of troubled online retailer RedEnvelope has a benefit for space-hungry startups near its SoMa headquarters at 149 New Montgomery. Yelp and Slide are among the rapidly expanding companies in the neighborhood. I asked Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman if he was going to swoop in on the space. "I wish 'cause it looks like a cool building, but we recently added space at 706 Mission so I think we're locked in there for a while," he told me. No word from Slide CEO Max Levchin. RedEnvelope signed a five-year lease in July 2004, with a base rent of $51,332 a month for 28,000 square feet. (Photo by Google Street View)

RedEnvelope issues hundreds of pink slips

Owen Thomas — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:29:02 PDT

San Francisco-based online and catalog retailer RedEnvelope, abandoned by its CEO and its bank, has laid off substantially all of its 200-some employees, we hear. The website is expected to go offline Friday morning. The company, founded in 1997 and taken public in 2003, was hit by woes both old and new. For an e-commerce business, it was slow to embrace change, relying too long on its printed catalogs, and failing to embrace even the most basic techniques of acquiring customers online.

New York Times board member's claim to fame: e-commerce failure RedEnvelope

Owen Thomas — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:40:00 PDT

Scott Galloway of Firebrand Partners scored a coup recently: The New York Times Co. agreed to nominate him and a fellow activist investor for a seat on its board. Did the Times do any due diligence on him? Galloway's chief accomplishment online is cofounding RedEnvelope, a San Francisco-based online retailer.

An online retailer whose CEO just quit. An online retailer whose credit line was just revoked by Wells Fargo. An online retailer whose stock fell more than 50 percent today, heading towards penny territory. Actually, Galloway seems uniquely well qualified to serve on the Times board.

365 Main outage causes aftershocks in Web world

Owen Thomas — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:38:02 PDT

We've now learned more about the outage at 365 Main's San Francisco datacenter that knocked some of the Web's most popular sites offline. The latest theory: ~~An employee, reportedly drunk, hit the emergency-power-off switch in 365 Main's Colo 4 room.~~ (Update: I no longer know whether to trust the source who sent in the tip about a drunk employee.) Other sites located in other rooms were unaffected. This isn't the first time 365 Main has suffered an EPO-induced outage; a major one still remembered by customers occurred back in April 2005, and another took place last year. After the jump, a gallery of the carnage caused, and a roundup of reactions.

Some of the affected websites — most of which are back online — played it straight with customers, like Craigslist. Others offered the usual pack of lies websites trot out. AdBrite, for example, tried to claim that the outage was due to "scheduled maintenance," and RedEnvelope, the e-commerce gifts site which just today crowed about moving all of its Web operations to 365 Main, said the outage was a systems upgrade. Busted!

Datacenter 365 Main released a self-congratulatory ...

Megan McCarthy — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:44:36 PDT

Datacenter 365 Main released a self-congratulatory announcement celebrating two years of continuous uptime for client RedEnvelope, mere hours before today's ~~drunken~~ blackout.. [PR Newswire]