Suitably equipped customers could actually see pictures of the toys, including a Ravensburger game called the A-maze-ing Labyrinth. “Travel the corridors of the enchanted labyrinth in search of treasures,” read the carnival-like pitch. “But watch out! The walls shift, and the passages can close, leaving you trapped! For ages eight and older.” Lucas was a year younger, but did it matter if the child was as bright as his mother, the network expert? “It seems to be an interesting game,” Luciana Gores e-mailed me, “and it won a Parent’s Choice award.” And so she paid her $24.95 and shipping, which, given the light weight of the toy, was modest.
Thanks to the Internet, the Lilienfelds suddenly had the whole world as a market, not just customers living near by. The fact that White Rabbit was in a university town, with graduates all over the planet, could only help. So could the fact that the Internet was expanding overseas even more rapidly than in the United States.
White Rabbit also appealed to Stuart Lowry, another promising kind of customer—the computer jock turned family man. A Maryland resident in his late twenties, he wouldn’t have made the pulses of marketers quicken several years ago; he was a grad student then at Johns Hopkins University and, like many people on the Internet, had more time than money. But that had changed. Lowry now worked at Computer Science Corporation, a large defense contractor, pulling down a salary in the mid-forties. He was married and lived in a townhouse, and four months ago his wife had given birth to a baby boy. And so, when Lowry was cruising the Internet from work and spotted a notice announcing White Rabbit Toys, he favored it with a virtual visit. He ordered a colorful toy top for $13, the Floor Spinner from Primetime Playthings.
Many people on the Web were young males more interested in pizza or condoms than in baby toys, but the Lilienfelds were looking ahead a few years when the same Net people would be parents. “It’s an act of faith,” Bob Lilienfeld said. “Today’s demographics and selling a lot of toys on the Net may be out of synch. But today’s college students are tomorrow’s parents. Tomorrow’s parents aren’t going to consider ordering by computer any different from getting in a car and going to the shopping center.”
Other trends might work in the Lilienfelds’ favor. More and more Americans were time-short, with long commutes; Stuart Lowry himself spent forty-five minutes each way, and that actually was a quick trip compared to those in cities such as Los Angeles. In northern Virginia I knew of parents rising at 4 A.M. to go to jobs in Washington some forty miles away, and not a few of them were high-tech workers who would sooner or later end up on the Internet.
When I reached Bob and Jo Ann Lilienfeld in the middle of November, White Rabbit itself had been on the Net maybe a week and had enjoyed around 1,000 virtual visits in that time. They were hoping that these numbers would multiply as Christmas neared. It was too soon to tell how many of these people would actually order. Back in June, though, the Lilienfelds had grown excited after reading about Larry Grant in the New York Times and elsewhere.
“I saw this figure of 20 million Net users,” Jo Ann said of the numbers du jour, “and thought there’s definitely an opportunity here. But I didn’t want to go about it in a half-baked manner. I thought there had to be someone who could combine knowledge of the Net with marketing experience.” She checked out a local cybermall and found it wanting in the latter area.
That wasn’t surprising, given Jo Ann’s perfectionism and eagerness to avoid easy but far-from-satisfactory solutions—whether in retail or life in general. She had grown up in a cash-short household where, more often than not, the children would get out the oatmeal cartons and construction paper and scissors and cobble together their own toys. And the same creativity had carried over to her Bloomies days as one of the resident experts on Christmas tree trimmings. According to the Lilienfelds, it was JoAnn who came up with the idea of selling leafless, white branches. She and Bob had moved to Ann Arbor because he kept flying off to the Midwest to consult for clients in Midland, and they felt that married people needed to spend more time together. JoAnn went about establishing the White Rabbit just as conscientiously.
Not finding the right toys for her own children, she studied the demographics of Ann Arbor to verify that a toy store could thrive there. She concluded that in a university community, many would love those wooden train sets and other classic toys as opposed to the trendier offerings that were touted on television and sold at Toys ᴙ Us. Ann Arbor responded well. A local paper told how she blessed her store with a public bathroom—how she kept diapers and spare wipes around for the parents of children and emergencies. No need for toilets existed on the Internet. But even at this early stage, having read up on the Netfolks, she was attuned to the need to adapt to the culture of cyberspace.
JoAnn finally decided that her best savior, the requisite miracle-worker with both Net and marketing experience, lived right there in the Lilienfeld household. Those past few months her husband had been succeeding off a mix of garbage and the Internet.