SkyMall









Last month, C&A Marketing quietly purchased the SkyMall brand and assets from its parent company, Xhibit Corp., which filed for bankruptcy in January. But it wasn’t until recently that SkyMall’s Twitter account started hyping the catalog’s comeback with pictures of Bauhaus-style fish bowls and sumo-wrestler side tables.

Further Reading SkyMall, killed by the smartphone

Still, don’t expect the new SkyMall to be just like the old SkyMall. Chaim Pikarski, C&A Marketing’s executive vice president told Ars that there will be “dramatic changes” to the catalog’s product line.

Instead the company wants to source ”more of the innovative, fun, cool products that people are looking for, but that are still in keeping with the DNA of SkyMall,” Pikarski told Ars in an e-mail. "SkyMall has always been about serving a particular need, a travel gadget that you can’t find anywhere else but that serves a real purpose. That is what we are bringing more of, but we will still keep some of the crazy ‘look at that products’ that add excitement as well.”

So, while C&A Marketing doesn’t want to give up the full-size bronze yeti statue that gets people to open the airplane seat back catalog in the first place, you might see fewer National Football League high heel shoe wine holders.

Digital marketing is also going to be a bigger deal in SkyMall 2.0. When Xhibit filed for bankruptcy, the company’s CEO blamed in-flight Wi-Fi and electronic devices for SkyMall’s shrinking profitability. With handheld game systems, tablets that can play movies, and laptops you could use to buy SkyMall’s products at a discount on, say, Amazon, people just didn’t buy things from SkyMall anymore.

Pikarski told Ars that SkyMall’s Web traffic has been doing well since its original owner filed for bankruptcy and that C&A Marketing plans to bring the physical catalog back into circulation in the fourth quarter of this year. Essentially, the catalog will act as a branding vehicle to direct people back to the website.

The SkyMall rebranding is consistent with C&A Marketing’s business model: it tries to breathe life into legacy brands, usually those companies that were left behind by the digital age. C&A Marketing acquired portions of Ritz Camera after it went under in 2012, and it became an official Polaroid licensee, using the brand to develop a camera called the Polaroid Cube. (Incidentally, the Polaroid Cube is featured prominently all over the SkyMall website at the time of this writing).

"This is what we are expert at,” Pikarski said. "taking a distressed brand and making it relevant by looking at its DNA, and developing relevant unique products that people want to buy. With SkyMall, we have some ideas, we could be in airport stores, lounges, hotels or resorts. We are looking at licensing deals with retailers, possibly a store within a store or stand alone stores in airports."

But will SkyMall stay the SkyMall we know and love, just with fewer compression socks? Only time—measured by my Celtic Dragon Wall Clock—will tell.

Listing image by SkyMall