Who put the first catalog in a seat pocket?
Robert Worsley was an accountant at Price Waterhouse when the idea arrived mid-flight in 1989. He was paging through the Giftmaster catalog in the seat pocket in front of him and decided the merchandise was terrible.
Worsley incorporated SkyMall in Arizona and mailed a 100-page business plan to 50 venture capitalists and individual investors. In February 1990, Alan Ashton, the co-creator of WordPerfect, agreed to finance it with $250,000.
Getting started cost nearly $3 million. That money bought a 21,000-square-foot warehouse in Phoenix and a customer service center running NeXT computers and Sun Microsystems servers, serious equipment for a mail-order startup in 1990.
The first SkyMall catalog went out on Eastern Airlines in 1990. It carried goods from Hammacher Schlemmer, Spiegel, The Nature Company, The Wine Enthusiast and Bits and Pieces, which SkyMall bought at a 35 percent discount and resold at list price.
Revenue in that first year was $200,000. The reach was real and the economics were not, a sentence that also fits Pets.com a decade later.
How did SkyMall get into almost every airline?
Once the first carrier signed, the rest came quickly. TWA began carrying the catalog in February 1991 and Continental Airlines added it that April. July 1991 was the flood: Alaska, Atlantic Southeast, Delta, Horizon, SkyWest and USAir all started carrying SkyMall in the same month.
The deal was easy for an airline to accept. Carriers were paid a percentage of what SkyMall sold, so the catalog cost them nothing up front.
The complication was weight. Early editions ran 60 to 80 pages, and paper burns jet fuel. When the sales commissions did not cover the difference, SkyMall paid the airlines for the extra fuel their catalogs consumed.
Revenue reached $5.4 million in 1991, and the company was losing about half a million dollars a month at the time.
That pairing of enormous distribution and thin margins defined SkyMall for the next 25 years. The catalog sat in front of more American shoppers than most department store chains and still had to argue about postage and fuel surcharges. The strange end of the merchandise, the life-size garden yeti and the dog staircases, is the reason anyone remembers the brand, and it was never where the money was.
Who owned SkyMall before the bankruptcy?
SkyMall did not stay independent. On July 18, 2001, Gemstar-TV Guide International acquired all of SkyMall's outstanding common stock.
Gemstar's later annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission put the aggregate purchase price at $50.1 million, made up of $22.2 million in cash and roughly 741,000 Gemstar shares valued at $36.58 each. SkyMall shareholders received $1.50 and 0.03759 of a Gemstar share for every share they held.
That $50.1 million is the figure to remember. Fourteen years later the entire business, brand included, changed hands for under four percent of it.
Ownership kept moving after 2001, and every owner inherited the same weakness. SkyMall's audience was rented from the airlines. There were no subscribers, only passengers, and they stayed only as long as the carriers kept signing contracts.
A catalog business that controls its own mailing list can survive a bad year. Montgomery Ward built a century of sales on a book households asked for. SkyMall never owned a name until a customer placed an order, and most passengers never did.
Why did SkyMall go bankrupt in 2015?
Phones finished it. SkyMall's revenue fell from $33.7 million in 2013 to $15.8 million for the nine months ending in September 2014.
Scott Wiley, the Xhibit Corp. executive who signed the company's bankruptcy papers, put the cause plainly in a statement reported by Fortune in 2015: "With the increased use of electronic devices on planes, fewer people browsed the SkyMall in-flight catalog."
The carriers moved before the creditors did. Delta Air Lines ended its SkyMall contract on November 30, 2014, and in December Southwest Airlines gave notice that it would stop carrying the catalog on April 1, 2015.
Losing two airlines that size gutted the distribution SkyMall's merchants were paying for. SkyMall and its parent, Xhibit Corp., filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Phoenix in January 2015.
The collapse looks abrupt in the headlines and was not. Seat-back screens, in-flight wifi and a phone loaded with downloaded video had spent years eating the catalog's only real asset, which was a bored passenger with nothing else to look at.
Who owns the SkyMall brand today?
C&A Marketing, a consumer products company in Edison, New Jersey, bought the SkyMall assets out of Chapter 11 for $1.9 million in the spring of 2015. The same business now trades as C+A Global and still counts SkyMall among its brands.
It runs SkyMall as an online store at skymall.com, selling gadgets, home goods and travel gear to people who go looking for them, which is the opposite of the original model. There is also a SkyMall storefront on Walmart's marketplace, where buyer reviews run into September 2026.
The buyer was blunt about what he had bought. Chaim Pikarski, then C&A Marketing's executive vice president, told CNN Money in 2015: "Even in the past when people did read SkyMall in-flight, they read it as entertainment."
His plan was equally plain. "The way you run a catalog business is by mailing them to people or by engaging them in e-commerce," Pikarski told CNN Money the same year. SkyMall in 2026 is the e-commerce half of that sentence.
A brand outliving the shelf it sold from is the normal ending now. Sharper Image has had no stores of its own since 2008 and survives as a licensed name on other companies' gadgets.
Is there anything left in the seat pocket in 2026?
Print did come back, briefly. In October 2015 SkyMall returned as an insert inside United Airlines' in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, and the company followed with a 36-page holiday edition mailed to its best customers.
The host did not last either. Delta stopped printing Sky in 2020, American Airlines retired American Way in 2021, and United published its last print issue of Hemispheres in September 2024 before moving the title to digital only that October.
The slot SkyMall filled no longer exists on the three biggest US carriers. The advertising that used to sit in the seat pocket runs on the screen in the seat back instead, which is where United now points brands through its Kinective Media network.
Pikarski had not ruled out a return in 2015, telling ABC News: "We're going to re-engage with the airlines to see if it makes sense." Eleven years on there is no print catalog left on a major US airline to re-engage with.
Where to find a SkyMall catalog today
Old SkyMall issues are ephemera rather than collectibles, so they trade for about what a used paperback costs rather than what a rarity costs. Sellers list them by year and by airline edition, and condition is most of the price. For a copy to keep, browse the vintage SkyMall catalog listings on Etsy. For a copy to read, the Internet Archive has scanned full editions from the catalog's final years, including the Early Spring 2015 issue.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is SkyMall still in business in 2026?
Yes. SkyMall exists in 2026 as an online store at skymall.com, owned by C+A Global, the Edison, New Jersey company that bought the brand out of bankruptcy as C&A Marketing in 2015. What no longer exists is the standalone SkyMall catalog that sat in airline seat pockets from 1990 until the Chapter 11 filing in January 2015.
Why did SkyMall go bankrupt?
SkyMall filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2015, after revenue fell from $33.7 million in 2013 to $15.8 million in the nine months ending September 2014. Passengers spent flights on phones and tablets rather than the seat-pocket catalog, and Delta Air Lines ended its SkyMall contract on November 30, 2014, with Southwest Airlines giving notice that it would drop the catalog on April 1, 2015.
How much did SkyMall sell for?
C&A Marketing bought the SkyMall assets for $1.9 million at a bankruptcy auction in Phoenix in the spring of 2015. That is a steep markdown from 2001, when Gemstar-TV Guide International paid an aggregate $50.1 million for SkyMall's outstanding stock.