Our first stop in NetWorld!, in fact, might well be one of my favorite stores in cyberspace—White Rabbit Toys.

CHAPTER
TWO

Business on the Net:

From White Rabbit

Toys to “Intel Inside”

Bob Lilienfeld worked for Procter & Gamble and the outfit behind the Muppets, and JoAnn Lilienfeld was a buyer at Bloomingdale’s. Nowadays he consults on solid waste and other environmental issues. His wife, a neatly coifed woman who looks and dresses like an upscale schoolteacher,[[2.1]] has started a toy store called White Rabbit Toys in honor of the character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Bob enjoys technology. JoAnn herself is no slouch in that area. They are in their forties now but relish new marketing wrinkles just as much as when they were earning their MBAs from Northwestern University.

So Bob and JoAnn Lilienfeld have set up shop on the Internet, where, in a surprising but logical way that a mathematician like Lewis Carroll would have loved, their respective business ventures mesh.

Wandering through commercial listings on the Web, I discovered the virtual White Rabbit just as Christmas shoppers were crowding the corporeal White Rabbit up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Bob was a technohusband par excellence. He designed the toy store online, claimed just the right address on the World Wide Web (http://www.toystore.com), wrestled with the technical issues, and helped take orders from customers, the first of whom lived in Brazil. JoAnn would pay Bob in his favorite currency: teddy bears. The big question was: Will they make any money at it? I electronically hung around their virtual store and chatted with Bob on the phone as the season progressed.

He and his wife were among the thousands of small business people who were trying new marketing paradigms on the Net, where the denizens hated intrusive huckstery but might take to electronic catalogues.

Compared to most other business people on the Internet, the Lilienfelds were quick studies. You could type an electronic address into your computer and see a White Rabbit logo and a greeting from the toy store in several languages. Then you clicked your mouse on the proper area of your screen and opened up a colorful catalogue with not only blurbs but also pictures of tops and puzzles and wooden toy trains of the kind your parents might have bought for you. Most of White Rabbit’s offerings were classics that you would never see at Toys ᴙ Us.