Beauty products e-tailer eve.com, an idealab! company, has quietly given up
the ghost and sold its name to competitor sephora.com.
The site now says “Eve.com recently closed for business … we recommend you
visit sephora.com.”
A spokesperson for sephora.com confirmed to InternetNews.com that they
“negotiated with idealab! and purchased eve.com’s name, the URL and access to
its customer base.”
Asked what that access consists of, the spokesperson said sephora.com bought
the right to contact eve.com’s customer base by e-mail, twice. In
fact, the first round of e-mails from sephora is going out today, the spokesperson
said, offering a greeting; the second round will offer discounts on a
customer’s initial purchase from sephora.com.
The sephora.com spokesperson said sephora has no immediate plans to resurrect
the site, as it “sold many of the same products.” Eve.com apparently shut
down quietly about two weeks ago. There was no immediate word on job losses
there.
Eve.com reportedly was the victim of a security breach in September in which
the site was temporarily shut down after it reportedly exposed customers’
names and addresses, orders and types of credit cards customers used, and the
last five digits of card numbers.
Parent company idealab! on Oct. 18 withdrew its own IPO, citing adverse market
conditions.
Launched in October 1999, sephora.com is the online arm of Sephora, a
division of French company Mokt Hennessey Louis Vuitton (LVMH).
The Sephora retail concept arrived in the United States in mid-1998 with the
first New York and Miami stores. Now there are 50 bricks and mortar stores,
including the 21,000-square-foot global flagship store in Rockefeller Center
in New York.
Meanwhile, Reuters was reporting that a “cyberwar” over online perfume sales
in France claimed its first victim after retailer Parfumsnet.com announced
that a string of lawsuits had forced it off-line.
Perfume giants in France — from L’Oreal to LVMH — have filed at least 16
suits against the Parfumsnet.com group, forcing it to shut down its French
site at least temporarily.
