Revenge Glitter Shipping Service Too Successful

Revenge has never looked so shiny or colorful. One Australian website, shipyourenemiesglitter.com, offered do just that — send an envelope full of glitter to a person’s enemies. The idea garnered so much attention that the website actually crashed.

For $9.99 AUD (about $8.00 USD), the service promised to send an envelope full of glitter to the enemy of your choosing. Since glitter is notoriously pervasive, lingering on carpets, floorboards, clothing, hair and pretty much anything it comes into contact with, this seemed to many people like the perfect, craft-inspired, passive-aggressive revenge gesture.

The website itself read like a joke — with expletive-laden descriptions like “So pay us money, provide an address anywhere in the world and we’ll send them so much glitter in an envelope that they’ll be finding that [expletive] everywhere for weeks.”

According to the Huffington Post, the unique service’s founder, Matt Carpenter, said that the site got more than 1.3 million visits and over 300,000 shares on Twitter and Facebook in just the first day.

Shipyourenemiesglitter.com got so many orders that Carpenter had to remove the order page altogether, and now the business is for sale.

Carpenter tweeted this message Wednesday morning: “ShipYourEnemiesGlitter with 1m visits, 270k social shares, $xx,xxx in sales, tonnes of people wanting to order. 24 hours old. For sale.”

One of the biggest problems that the business faces is the sheer volume of orders that they received, since the service is so popular.

“One simple thing any e-commerce or internet-based start-up has to do before they launch is get their supply chain in order,” advises Chris Franzen, Director of Logistics for Broussard Logistics. “The vast reach and viral nature of the internet is a blessing and a curse to new businesses. Enlisting partners who are experts in fulfillment and shipping, combined with the flexibility to react whether you have 10, 100, or 1,000 orders if absolutely vital.”

Transportation and shipping are a couple of the world’s largest industries, and remarkably efficient as well (at about 6% of all economic activity). However, it still takes a lot of manpower to stuff those envelopes and ship them internationally. Not to mention a pretty high tolerance for glitter.