Stay Tuned/Pictures Of Useless Things

It may not be much of a surprise to you when I say that the Sharper Image catalog is full of junk - merchandise which is being peddled at ridiculously high prices using snob appeal, but in many cases is no better than the various miraculous items being touted on shopping channels everywhere.

However, I may still have a chance to surprise you when I assert, as I am doing now, that they weren't always like that.

I remember when the company came into existence. They were always slick - not as slick as now, though, they didn't have the money. Their catalog most resembled that of DAK, a company which sold (maybe still sells) electronic gadgets and stereo components through the mail. Both were color catalogs, consisting of a product photo which was often a promo photo from the manufacturer and a huge block of breathless prose from the president of the company - which wasn't saying a lot, because they were both basically one-man shows. Richard Thalmeyer, uber-yuppie, was the heart and soul of Sharper Image; Drew Kaplan, uber-geek, the brain and brawn of DAK.

DAK always had a more honest approach: We're selling you this $500 component for a hundred because, frankly, the manufacturer isn't going to be making them anymore and we got a special deal - but they promise to support them, and they're fine components, nothing wrong with them at all. Sharper Image went for the prestige appeal: You will not see anything like this in any other catalog on earth; we have an exclusive.

DAK was about good stuff cheap for compulsive gadget acquirers. Sharper Image was about status symbols for compulsive gadget acquirers. It was inevitable that they would quickly become less and less alike.

I have no idea whether DAK is still printing catalogs, but if it is, I bet they're on the same paper as always, and I bet Drew is still churning out copy, unless his wife has forced him to retire due to exhaustion. Thalmeyer, I note here, is now listed solely as "Founder" in his little inspirational message which lives inside the front cover of a Sharper Image catalog; presumably this means he no longer participates in the day-to-day affairs of the company.

Meanwhile, in its efforts to not be DAK, Sharper Image is well on its way to becoming Brookstone.

It used to be that I could find at least a couple of items in a Sharper Image catalog that I could point to and say, "Yes, they sell a lot of overpriced junk, but this is something which is justifiably expensive and high-quality, something you wouldn't find anywhere else."

The highest-quality items in most Sharper Image catalogs these days are brand-name watches and consumer electronics, things you can find other places, possibly for less money. Everything else is junk. Some of it comes close to being chindogu (I'll explain that in a minute.) Some of it uses the photo and copy to hide its poor manufacture - it really is a cool toy, but it'll fall apart ten minutes after you get it home. Some of it performs exactly as advertised, but no one really needs it - why do you need a laser pointer, anyway? And some of it borders on fraud.

An item in the latter category is what prompted this screed, but let me explain chindogu first.

Chindogu are inventions with a functional booby-trap inside. They seem like such great ideas! And they do what they're supposed to do. But when you actually try to use one, you realize that it has other problems which make it completely unusable. A favorite example of mine is an umbrella which has hooks inside to hang things from. The reasoning is, when you carry an umbrella, you lose the use of one hand, making it difficult to shop for a long time. Hang the packages from the inside of the umbrella! Of course, in practice, the packages bang into your face and obstruct your vision, and keeping the umbrella in balance in a strong wind is somewhat tricky.

By definition, none of the items in the Sharper Image catalog can actually be chindogu. Chindogu are created for philosophical and inadvertent humor value and can never be patented or sold, or their status is revoked. But they sometimes come close.

I note that the Sharper Image is selling a variant can opener which apparently cuts midway through the crimped rim of the can. The ad claims that no sharp edges are left on the rim or the lid (unlike the model discussed here a while back, which merely substituted one sharp edge for another). Nonetheless I believe I can detect some hidden pitfalls: It looks from here like the can is more difficult to open cleanly this way and takes more force. More importantly, even if I'm wrong about those conclusions, it's a "solution" to something I don't concede was much of a problem in the first place.

The punchline is that the Sharper Image is selling this - a plastic-handled can opener - for twenty bucks. The one I discussed last June, which I found in ad circulars, was selling at two for ten dollars, as I recall, and I thought those were overpriced. Even with chindogu value added in.

The can opener isn't the item I was most surprised to see, though. That would be the IGIA Hair Removal System.

I've been seeing ads for this in newspaper circulars for months, alongside the weight-loss pills and ceramic angels, and was all prepared to write a piece about how this had to be a scam. I did not expect to see it in the Sharper Image catalog, with a better product photo than the manufacturer's, an asking price which is about the same, and some inadvertently revealing copy.

The ads in the circulars appear to be direct from the manufacturer's distribution arm. I will quote the only informative block of copy here. Weird grammar, missing articles, run-ons, et cetera are verbatim.

This system uses a recently developed electrolytic hair removal method from UK (similar to electrolysis without the use of needles) that painlessly eliminates unwanted facial or body hair even from sensitive areas and prevents new growth. Unlike common epilation and depilatory devices that can cause skin irritation, this system uses mild radio frequency pulses, that is absolutely safe, (between 26 and 27.125 MHz) delivered through the tweezers to remove hair without touching the skin. Applied for 15 to 20 seconds, the electronic pulses penetrate the hair shaft causing painless cellular decomposition of the root itself. The procedure typically requires only one application which usually keeps hair from growing back. Unit is portable and plugs into household outlet.

Electrolysis works by permanently damaging the hair follicle so that it cannot regrow hair. That isn't a condemnation - electrolysis is okay with me, if that's your thing - just stating it baldly (so to speak).

The rest of the copy in the ad makes a big deal of the process being pain-free (electrolysis stings like hell) and that it doesn't involve a probe (i.e. needle) being inserted into the follicles - in fact, it has the audacity, and poor grammar, to say "Be aware of cheap imitations that uses harmful needle points." The Sharper Image copy, which I'll show you in a second, also stresses this.

But electrolysis has to affect the follicle, down at the bottom, which means you have to stick a needle in there. Vibrating the hair around with any sort of signal may make it more prone to fall out by itself - you can make hair fall out if you look at it the wrong way - but it does nothing to stop the hair from regrowing. At least, that's my take on it.

As for those "radio frequency pulses," I have misplaced my frequency chart, so all I can tell you is that it's somewhere between the AM and FM bands, which covers a lot of ground. But since this thing looks like a plug-in transformer, a dial to change the voltage level, and nothing else in the circuit from there to the little shielded pair of metal tweezers, I am suspecting that the "pulses" are just the frequency of the noise coming from the power current itself, and that the wording is to appease those who are scared of applying AC current to their face - even in severely watered-down form.

All of this is guesswork on my part. I am not going to pay a hundred dollars for one of these things so I can check it out. However, when I read the wording in the Sharper Image version, I felt it actually lent credence to my suspicions. You decide.

New Igia Hair Removal System employs the same principles as expensive salon electrolysis (but without the needle). Simply grasp the hair in the tweezer, wait 20-40 seconds, and voila! The hair slides out. No more nicks, cuts, irritation.

Harmless radio frequency energy is transmitted via the tweezer to remove hair at the root - without touching the skin. Use anywhere on your face and body. While results vary, many users find hair is removed permanently.

I love "results vary" clauses, don't you?

Another thing: You have to hold this on each hair you want to remove for twenty to forty seconds? Clearly not for those people whose projects include large amounts of skin area.

The Sharper Image people have included some dreck before, but never something that comes as close as this to appearing to be an outright fraud. (I'm not claiming it's a fraud - as I say, I haven't personally tested it. I'm just saying that its claims seem spurious to me.)

The sad thing is, even if the gizmo actually does what it claims to do, it damages the Sharper Image reputation anyway. With a niche as shaky as the one they are trying to cling to, one cannot afford even the briefest whiff of mendacity.

[February 2007:] A comment I appended here originally implies that I missed the preceding week due to the installation of a new computer and then an ISP failure. In case you were wondering about the gap.

DAK is back. At the time I wrote the original article it was, in fact, moribund (having died in 1994), but in 2000 Drew Kaplan restarted the business, and yes, it has a website. If you want to read the story of what happened (and get an idea of Kaplan's chatty tone - folks, the whole catalog used to be written just like this) try this page.

For more about chindogu, the book you want is 101 Un-useless Japanese Inventions by Kenji Kawakami. Look in the "humor" section of your bookstore. There is also a sequel, 99 More Un-useless Japanese Inventions (and I believe that there has also been an omnibus edition since then, whose name I forget).

I'm sorry to say that The Sharper Image has only continued its slide in the intervening years. Becoming Brookstone? As far as I'm concerned, they're well below Brookstone by now. The item they continue to tout the most is their Ionic Breeze air cleaner - even trotting out old Thalmeyer and the grandkids on cut-rate-looking TV ads - a product which, by the by, Consumer Reports has insisted several times just does not do what The Sharper Image says it does.

Although in the original article the best I could do with tracking IGIA was to give an address and phone number, in intervening years they have set up a website, and they will be happy to sell you one of their revolutionary and possibly useless hare removal systems, along with all manner of other goods. However ... do note that I have found any number of reports of IGIA taking people's money and not delivering products, or of charging someone far more than the stated price for the product. I don't claim to have verified these reports; I have no idea if they're true. But I have definitely seen them.

You might also want a look at this page - which confirmed in 2002 what logic had already told me in 1998 - and this one.

By the by, it has been conclusively established that the purpose of a laser pointer is to be a cat toy.

[May 2009:] First off, in case you are reading this from Mars, Sharper Image got its comeuppance in 2008:

On February 19, 2008, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, blaming low sales aggravated by a decline in consumer spending and negative publicity surrounding its Ionic Breeze air purifiers. Sharper Image indicated that stores in economically impacted areas would be closed immediately. As of June 1, 2008, 96 of the company's 186 stores nationwide had completed the liquidation process and were closed.

(Taken from Wikipedia entry)

That "negative publicity" surrounding its Ionic Breeze air purifiers is, in my opinion, because they were complete and utter frauds.

I would like to note that I do not place the blame on Sharper Image's decline entirely on Richard Thalmeyer. Thalmeyer may have been a jerk and a snob in some ways, but he had standards. Although Wikipedia says he was officially ousted in 2006, as I note above, the evidence suggests he had been reduced to a figurehead considerably earlier. These days Thalmeyer holds court here, offering merchandise and copy which is more like Sharper Image was in its old days.

But I still like Drew Kaplan's approach better.

and now back to our program

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