As promised by the web service, a glitter bomb sent to an enemy can be a real nuisance.
But the glitter that just wouldn’t go away turned out to be on the hands of the man who created shipyourenemiesglitter.com, who after a few days of viral attention and web-site crashing orders begged off.
“Hi guys I’m the founder of this website,” wrote Mathew Carpenter on Product Hunt last week. “Please stop buying this horrible glitter product — I’m sick of dealing with it. Sincerely, Mat.”
Some quick cash might be the remedy to remove the glitter off Carpenter’s hands.
His site went up for sale on flippa.com, receiving more than 300 bids and quickly exceeded the $60,000 reserve bid.
The New Castle, Australia-based shipyourenemiesglitter.com launched on Jan. 12 and received $20,000 in orders in just a few hours. The concept is – or was – simple: pay $8 (U.S.) through PayPal, provide the address of an enemy or thick-skinned prank target and Carpenter’s site promised a discrete envelop full of glitter in the mail that would quickly spread as the person pulled out what seemed like a piece of legitimate mail.
Carpenter, 22, was overwhelmed with the response and quickly disarmed the bombs by deleting the order function. It received attention from dozens of news organizations, including Cult of Mac, and received more than 2.5 million page views and nearly half a million mentions on Facebook after just a few days.
Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover called it the “ultimate troll product” and Carpenter’s site promised to ship with malice.
“There’s someone in your life right now who you f—ing hate,” according to the website’s mission statement. “Whether it be your sh—y neighbor, a family member or that bitch Amy down the road who thinks it’s cool to invite you to High Tea and not provide any weed.”
Carpenter told The Guardian of London he intended shipyourenemiesglitter.com to be a “small side project” that took on a life of its own.
The current bid for shipyourenemiesglitter.com is at $70,800 and the sale will close in two days. Carpenter is not sure whether he will ship the orders that came in before shutdown or outsource them to a third-party.
