Ferrit
January 14th 2009 06:37
The responses came thick and fast and were mostly negative, unfortunately.
Until today, Ferrit was a kind of online portal for a number of smaller retail shops who were able sell to customers via the Ferrit site. Today Ferrit is no more, and by the looks of things, nobody is desperately worried.
Ferrit's demise isn't even the result of anything recessional. By the look of the responses that came to the NZ Herald, Ferrit's gone down the tubes because it never really took off, because it was ill-conceived in the first instance, because Telecom was its owner, because, because, because. Nobody seems to have liked it.
What I most disliked about it were the terrible TV ads, which featured a young man who apparently had no life outside of his bedroom and who nattered away in a poncy voice about all the wonderful things he could buy on Ferit. God alone knows who it was supposed to appeal to, but I can't imagine it appealing to very many. At best, it reminded people about Ferrit's existence - if they cared.
Ferrit sold everything that the old department stores sold: sports gifts, clothing, babywear, electronics, food, health care, toys, the lot. Unfortunately so does The Warehouse, and it does it at much better prices - and is not only online, but also very big in the main centres as bricks and mortar.
Ferrit tried to come out of nowhere, and offered nothing particularly special. One of the gripes of the people responding to the Herald was that the prices were the same as in general retail stores, and there was postage on top.
But perhaps the biggest gripe was that it belonged to Telecom, and unfortunately Telecom has had increasingly bad press over the last decade, with its cavalier attitude to its customers, charging the earth while making millions for its shareholders.
Incidentally, one of the major NZ magazines had - or used to have - a page devoted to The Ferrit. It was a particularly nasty gossip page, mostly about the people in Auckland who had a bit of cash. Maybe Ferrit just wasn't the best name for the site in the first place.
The ferrit picture is by colalowe
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