Website selling cool/ unusual found tools and the like?

November 17, 2016 10:12 AM

I'm trying to refind a website that I used to peruse on occasion. It was a website that had unusual and cool objects. I specifically remembered it having a fair number of tools. It was fairly plain in design with a white background and seemed to me more like a display of cool stuff than a place really pushing to sell things.

It seemed kind of like a person had found a cool, say, Japanese measuring tape or a French can opener and then display them. There was a little blurb about what made each thing cool. I recall they did have prices associated with them so they must have been for sale.

It was sort of in the genre of look-at-this-cool-stuff-you-can-buy websites like Cool Material or Uncrate but it was much plainer and less commercial than those two. The feel was a little bit more like Cool Tools , except that the things were usually not something you could find on Amazon.

I've been thinking about how to find this site for a few days and it's been really bugging me. Sorry for the vague question, but I feel like ask.MeFi has solved some vaguer questions in the past, so I have my hopes!

Thank you for your help!

posted by adrianb to Shopping (6 answers total)

Sounds like you're describing Cool Tools.

They did a redesign a few months ago, but the content is largely the same. (I did see you mentioned Cool Tools, but I really think, given your description, that it might be the site.)
posted by yellowcandy at 10:23 AM on November 17, 2016

Best answer: Kiosk? It looks like they're on hiatus now, but they definitely sold things through the website/had prices listed for anything available for sale.
posted by quatsch at 10:25 AM on November 17, 2016 [4 favorites]

Here's what it looked like a few years ago, if that helps.
posted by yellowcandy at 10:26 AM on November 17, 2016

It's not Cool Tools, and I don't think it's Best Made in its earliest incarnations, either. (This is an online space that's been overwhelmed in recent years.)

There are couple of sites that come to mind: one was Kiosk, the other was a minimalistic blog whose name I can't remember that covered items like the Zeroli ice cream scoop, and had a short-lived store for the things it featured.
posted by holgate at 10:36 AM on November 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I'm 99% sure it was Kiosk. The overall design is a lot busier than I remembered but pages like this are the things I remembered. Thanks , quatsch. That was amazingly quick.

(It does seem like they stopped selling the items they found since I was last at the site.)
posted by adrianb at 10:36 AM on November 17, 2016

Before shifting their focus more towards bicycles, Mister Jalopy's store in Los Angeles, Coco's Variety was a lot like what you described. Strange tools, handpainted toolboxes, mutant cake tins, ancient pewter toys, Mexican cokes, etc. I loved it.
posted by seasparrow at 11:44 AM on November 17, 2016 [1 favorite]