May 24, 1999

DIGITAL COMMERCE

Success Stories From Ebay

By DENISE CARUSO

...Allee Willis, a Grammy-winning songwriter and artist who abandoned a seven-year foray into multimedia because she could not get the "suits" in Hollywood to invest in her Willisville Web community project, said Ebay "honestly inspired a career change for me, and after seven years of dedicating my life to interactive and being repulsed by it, Ebay brought me back."

A fanatical collector of 1950s atomic kitsch and a talent scout for what might best be called "outsider art" and artists, Ms. Willis found her online home.

"It's not even the sagas and who I've met," she said. "It's the system I have going for bidding -- right now, I have three G3 Macintoshes, with three bidding windows opened on each of them -- and what goes on when I want to win. I have a special swivel chair that I got just to do Ebay, and all I do is spin around from computer to computer, bang-bang-bang. My final bid goes in three seconds before the end of the auction, and I knock everyone out."

Her discovery of a painter selling his work on Ebay inspired her to start painting again for the first time in 10 years. "I thought if I could make enough money to keep my house I'd be happy," she said. "By the time I sold the third painting, the bell went off and I felt like I'd stumbled into what I'm supposed to be doing."

Sunday she opened a Web site for her latest find, Bubbles (www.bubblestheartist.com). But unlike previous discoveries, Bubbles the artist is Ms. Willis herself. She will sell Bubbles' paintings, along with matching objets de kitsch (such as Black Power Afro Picks and dog accessories), matching music (from her musician friends who have recorded "really, really horrible" versions of their famous songs) and outrageous, matching on-site animations with sound tracks (also for sale, of course), on both her Web site and on Ebay.

Ebay, she said, is "a fantastic interface for doing nothing but getting people together and getting the business people out of the way -- it's making a people's medium out of something that today is just being cluttered by business and technical junk."

Even though Ebay is big business, Ms. Willis said, "you don't see it -- you don't have to deal with anyone except the person who's buying or selling."

"If the trend in the next century is working for yourself," she asserted, "Ebay is going to do more for that than any other interface. It's easy and it's comfortable, and when you do it once you aren't afraid of it anymore." ...