Gawker: sharper image

Commercial real estate vacancies show no sign of dot-bomb 2.0

Jackson West — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:40:00 EDT

Recent reports from local real estate trackers put the amount of office space relinquished by local companies in the last quarter at the highest it has been since the third quarter of 2002 — 436,933 sq. ft, according to commercial broker CB Richard Ellis, or the equivalent of nearly all the space in the Transamerica pyramid. The East Bay and the South Bay also saw an uptick in vacancies. The bankruptcies of Sharper Image, Pay By Touch, and RedEnvelope helped push up San Francisco's vacancy rate, but South of Market remained an untouched bubble of business leases, thanks to expansion by Monster.com, Advent Software, and Splunk. (Photo by Thierry)

I Don't Even Know How I Ended Up On This List But AWESOME

Pareene — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:38:02 EDT

Wow, so I'm apparently getting blasts from The Sharper Image and they're inviting me to "demo" their new and insane and wonderfully useless products. This is some sort of LASER THEREMIN I think? Should I do it?

Sharper Image chairman quits but wants to buy bankrupt company

Jackson West — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:00:00 EDT

Sharper Image chairman and former CEO Jerry Levin resigned today, just short of two months after the company declared bankruptcy. Not satisfied with just how far he's helped run the icon of '80s yuppie excess into the ground, Levin reports that he and some investor buddies will buy some or all of the company's assets. If you're lucky enough to be one of Levin's friends, you can probably count on a massage chair or three this holiday season.

Bankrupt Sharper Image to haunt gadget lovers

Owen Thomas — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:40:16 EST

The news that Sharper Image, the San Francisco-based gadget-vending chain, has filed for bankruptcy has sparked a wave of premature nostalgia. Naive sorts think that Chapter 11 means a swift farewell to a company. Nothing of the sort. Sharper Image, buoyed by a loan from Wells Fargo, will stay open, continuing to hawk Ionic Breeze air purifiers while it sorts out its finances. Too bad. As a creative concern, Sharper Image went out of business long ago. It fired its founder, Richard Thalheimer in 2006, and is besieged by lawsuits; SF Weekly has an excellent retelling of that tale. The tragedy here is not that Sharper Image will soon roll up its windows; it's that it takes so long for a good idea gone bad to give up the ghost.