Chain hopes dads will make it better

Sharper Image Corp.'s website has been counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to Father's Day.

It's that important -- not necessarily to shoppers, but certainly to Sharper Image.

The purveyor of air purifiers, massage chairs and nose-hair trimmers loves Father's Day, its second-most-important sales-generating holiday. After losing almost $60 million last year, Sharper Image needs all the sales it can ring up, and Chris Woolley, a soccer coach from Rowland Heights, helped out at its store at Fashion Island in Newport Beach this week.

"I use it more as a gift place than a regular shopping place," Woolley said as he left the store with a barbecue grill set for his dad and a Warm & Cool Ultima Sleep Pillow for himself. "It tends to be slightly expensive for the everyday person."

Indeed. In the run-up to Sunday, the retailer pushed a crazy array of pricey devices for Pop. Send him to "gadget nirvana," it suggested, with a portable global positioning system for $900. Or give him some Trump Steaks -- as in the Donald -- the Connoisseur Collection, maybe, for $999. Or an experience in weightlessness aboard a highflying Boeing 727-200 for $3,675.

That's a tad more than the $54 the average adult plans to spend on Father's Day purchases this year, according to a Discover card survey. But Sharper Image has never seen or marketed itself as run-of-the-mill.

It mailed out its first catalog in 1979 and opened its first store in San Francisco, where the company is based, two years later. It boasts 186 stores today. The chain became a retailing phenomenon by offering offbeat items before they became widely available elsewhere. Now it sells a mix that includes travel alarm clocks, robot puppies, neck pillows, can openers and kayaks.

Its Ionic Breeze air purifiers were a huge hit for the company, and by 2004 accounted for 40% of sales. Then competitors began cranking out air purification products too, and Consumer Reports panned the 2005 Ionic Breeze as ineffective.

The next blow was falling sales of Sharper Image massage chairs as less expensive models appeared. This week, Sharper Image's Ultimate Human Touch Robotic Massage Chair (which says, "Goodbye, have a nice day," when you get up) was going for $4,799 while Wal-Mart offered one of its pricier versions for $598.