Urbanfetch, founded in 1999 and closed in 2000, was a

dot-com company A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com (alternatively rendered dot.com, dot com, dotcom or .com), is a company that conducts most of its businesses on the Internet, usually through a website on the World Wide Web that uses the popular top-level dom ...

from which customers ordered products (DVDs, music, books, snacks, gifts, etc.) online and had them delivered by bike messenger in less than an hour within certain delivery areas covering most of

Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...

and

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. The company's business plan was essentially identical to that of Kozmo.com, which led to a lawsuit from them. Apparently, Urbanfetch founder Ross Stevens had been approached to fund Kozmo but instead launched a competing business with an identical business model. The suit was settled in December 1999. Like Kozmo, Urbanfetch charged no delivery fee and sometimes offered significant discounts. It also gave away T-shirts and hats with each order when it first launched and provided warm cookies with each order. It ceased operations in October 2000. Its corporate delivery division was sold to Urban Express, a traditional courier service. Urbanfetch became somewhat of a joke after an episode of

The Daily Show ''The Daily Show'' is an American late-night talk show, late-night talk and news satire television program. It airs each Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central in the United States, with extended episodes released shortly after on Paramount+ ...

parodied its business model to the Post Office. Schmitt and Brown in their ''Build Your Own Garage'' (2010) conclude that the company “was buzz only and lacked a rigorous business model”.

References

Online retailers of the United States Defunct websites Dot-com bubble Internet properties established in 1999 Defunct online companies of the United States Defunct companies based in New York City Internet properties disestablished in 2000 1999 establishments in New York (state) {{ict-company-stub