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Richard is BACK!

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The man who invented the gadget craze of the 80's and 90's is back. After being ousted at The Sharper Image, get ready for RichardSolo.com, a bare-bones gadget e-commerce site that looks like TSI-lite for product and 1996 for design.

The Marin IJ has some even handed coverage of it, but this little snippet from the web said it best:

"Sometimes successful company founders should know when to fold them. Case in point is Richard Thalheimer who founded Sharper Image and has now founded an eCommerce site called Richard Solo that painfully displays that Thalheimer doesn't understand modern eCommerce....Richard Solo is an ugly site that has now competitive advantages. You can find better prices on Amazon, eBay or Froogle and you can discover cooler gadgets via Gizmodo or Engadget. We almost feel sorry for the guy, trying to stick it to his old company but making an inept attempt at it."

Ouch. Well, don't count him out, yet. This is a man who's business was supposed to have been killed several times over: Circuity City Express in the early '90's, the Internet later, and so on, but he kept on coming. And there's nowhere to go but up for RichardSolo.com!
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Anonymous said…
OMG! Took a quick glimpse of the site and it's really cheesy, especially the name. But you're right, you can't count him out. Will we see Tracy Wan as his new CFO?
Monday, June 11, 2007 at 7:29:00 PM PDT
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