Heavy demand for the much-anticipated debut of Target’s Lilly Pulitzer product line overloaded the retailer’s web site Sunday and left racks and shelves bare.
In advance of Sunday’s launch of the resort-themed designer items, Target began posting updates about its website on Twitter early in the morning. “We know you’re frustrated & we’re sorry,” a tweet posted about 7 a.m. ET said. “We appreciate your patience. You can now shop the #LillyforTarget collection.”
Target.com never crashed, but “there was extreme traffic” to the site, said Target spokesman Joshua Thomas. The company intentionally made the site inaccessible for about 15 minutes around 3 a.m. ET, he said.
Subsequently, online supplies were quickly bought up and by noon ET everything was “virtually sold out,” Thomas said.
Lines began forming early at brick-and-mortar stores Sunday and many shoppers went home empty-handed as products quickly sold out there, too.
Not surprisingly, dresses and handbags quickly cropped up on eBay with more than 9,400 listings of Lilly Pulitzer Target products. “That’s really disappointing to us,” Thomas said.
Target is “not the first retailer that’s experienced its products being sold” for a profit on eBay, he said. Limited product lines “become like collectors’ items,” Thomas said.
He said that Target does not plan to replenish supplies of the Pulitzer line, which had 250 different items.
Shopper Rachel Rickert, 41, of St. Louis Park, Minn., considered herself lucky to come out victorious in her hunt for Pulitzer goodies. When she explored Target.com about 7 a.m. ET, all of the dresses she was interested in were sold out.
Rickert then ventured to a nearby Target and everything there was sold out, too. But at a SuperTarget just a bit farther away, she found a dress that she described as “a beachy type of sundress.”
Blue and white with a pattern of seashells and seahorses, the dress isn’t for wearing to work, but “I will definitely get some good use out of it walking around the lakes this summer,” she said.
A manager told her that “by the time they opened the line was deeper than on Black Friday,” Rickert said. “‘Preppy Black Friday’ is what they called it.”
That hashtag — #LillyforTarget — continued to trend past noon ET. At that time, many products were sold out online and listed as unavailable in stores.
The meltdown is reminiscent of four years ago when Target released another signature product line from Italian luxury knitwear designer Missoni. Its website crashed repeatedly and in-store shoppers were met with lines and sellouts.
Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider
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