The Outnet’s $1 Sale Is Already Over

by Verena von Pfetten | 11:05 am, April 16th, 2010

Net-a-Porter’s sibling site The Outnet has spent the last month hyping their one year birthday with promises of a chance-of-a-lifetime $1 sale scheduled for today.

In order to be eligible to purchase you had to, of course, give The Outnet your email address at which point they would — or so they said — email you an invite with info on the sale, and thenemail you the day of to let you know what time it was actually happening.

Well, at 6:45AM EST Friday morning, savvy shoppers got their emails, went to the site, and were promptly informed that it was down. Less than an hour later, the sale was already closed. Unsurprisingly, people are not happy.

We were still sleeping off our Zac Posen for Target party high when all this happened, so here’s The Guardian’s take:

“An email announcing the time of the sale was finally sent early this morning (though many report still having not received it). At which point Outnet’s servers promptly crashed. Big web fail, guys. It’s quite a bad idea to aggressively market a huge online sale and not anticipate massive online demand …

At the time of writing your intrepid reporter still hasn’t been able to get on to the sale section of the site, and a look at Twitter makes it clear that I am not alone.”

Perhaps more viscerally summing up the process, NY Mag’s Amy Odell writes:

“It’s like going to a Ke$ha show, because you may as well since you’re on the list, and pulling up only to find hundreds of 15-year-old girls in polyester boob slings clogging the door like a cork in a bottle of wine, with a line of them snaking around the block in both directions. Not worth the stress.”

We agree.