Today’s flying experience is very different, of course. There are smartphones and laptops and iPads and seat-back screens with all sorts of on-demand viewing options. And, most of all, there’s in-flight Wi-Fi. Who needs SkyMall when you can log onto Amazon?

“Historically, the SkyMall catalog was the sole in-flight option for potential purchasers of products to review while traveling,” Xhibit’s chief financial officer, Scott Wiley, wrote in a note accompanying the company’s bankruptcy filing. “With the increased use of electronic devices on planes, fewer people browsed the SkyMall in-flight catalog.”

It is perhaps a bitter irony that SkyMall was undone by the very same phenomenon — new in-flight technology — that inspired its creation. The catalog was started in 1990 by a 32-year-old accountant named Robert Worsley, now a Republican state senator in Arizona. Mr. Worsley’s initial idea was for passengers to use the so-called Airphones built into the seat backs of many airplanes at the time to order merchandise midflight from SkyMall. Because the products were stored in warehouses near the airports, the passengers’ purchases would be waiting for them at the gate when they arrived. (Take that, Amazon Prime.)

As a business model, it was not very practical. Plus, people didn’t really like having yet another thing to lug home from the airport. Mr. Worsley soon shifted to a more traditional approach, selling space in the catalog to — and taking commissions from — manufacturers that shipped the goods themselves. Along the way, he discovered that air travelers preferred unconventional items. Like the iFetch Ball Launcher for Dogs. Or a glass table with a giant sumo wrestler sculpture as its base. Or bacon jam — “For the bacon lover who has everything.” (For the bacon lover who already has the jam, there’s also a bacon pillow.) An especially popular seller, for years now, has been the a garden statue of Bigfoot.

“A couple of iterations of the catalog made it clear that people on planes will not buy normal things that they find every day at the mall,” Mr. Worsley said in a phone interview. “They seem to hit on highly unique, I’ve-never-this-seen-before, kind of ‘Wow!’ things. The consumers buy or they don’t buy; I can’t claim any great genius.”