About this site

This is a reading desk built on top of a working catalogue. Ebony Snow's is a hair and beauty line out of Buffalo, New York; it published 427 products, with prices, stock states, photographs and its own descriptions, and it published a set of pages explaining how the line worked, who could sell it and what buyers were told. All of that is the source for everything you see here.

What is on the site

• 427 catalogue entries, sorted into six sections. Each entry carries the price and stock state the brand recorded, its photograph and the description it wrote.
• 16 pages from the brand — the FAQ, the closure notice, the ambassador and wholesale terms, the events, the reviews wall — reprinted in this layout without rewriting.
• 30 pieces written for this site, each one tied back to entries in the catalogue so a claim can be checked against a product that actually exists.
• A news section that is added to on a schedule.

What is not on the site

Nothing is filled in where the record is silent. Eight catalogue entries carry no price, so no price is shown for them. The show room is closed, and the stockist page says so. Where the brand made a claim about its own products, the claim is printed as the brand’s, in its own words, and is not repeated as ours.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on the site — the count of entries, the price range, the median, the number of shops — is counted from the catalogue at build time. None of them are typed in by hand, and when the catalogue changes they change with it.

Pages from the brand’s own site

10 pages that belong to the brand rather than to any one section of the catalogue, reprinted in this layout.