Tariffs, even the threat of them, deal final blow to Wichita e-commerce business

David Sasson has weathered a lot of trying situations in the 22 years he’s owned the e-commerce business Overstock Art, but he’s reached his limit.

Sasson filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy to liquidate the business, which is best known as OverstockArt.com.

“This is kind of raw and kind of new, and I’m not really wanting to talk much about it,” he said.

Overstock sold hand-painted oil paintings that were reproductions of famous works by artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

“We felt that we had a really nice product,” Sasson said.

When he started Overstock in 2002, he said the company was unique because the “internet was a very young distribution system.”

“It did well,” Sasson said. “We’ve grown and been through a lot.”

The financial meltdown, as he put it, of 2008 was a particular challenge.

Then came the pandemic.

“We definitely had some kind of scary weeks . . . because I think nobody was buying anything,” Sasson said at the time. “But then things kind of started blowing up.”

Back then, he said, he believed sales jumped “because everybody was at home buying things for the house, so we benefited from it.”

Then came complications.

“There was a lot of changing market conditions because . . . of the bubble that happened around COVID,” Sasson said. “Cost increases were off-the-charts high.”

A larger hurdle was when he got cancer in 2021 “and took a couple years to recover physically. Mentally, it took a little bit longer.”

Sasson said the business needed to keep changing to keep up with market changes.

“We needed to pivot. We needed to do some things that I wasn’t fast enough to do.”

Then came tariff trouble “that added fuel to the fire.”

Sasson said it’s “uncertainty and the actual tariffs themselves, really, the way they impact all parts of our business.”

Most of Overstock’s paintings came from China and some were from Vietnam.

“The threat was enough in our position,” he said. “We just did not see a path to be able to turn the ship around anymore. That’s really what caused us to feel like we had to file.”

The filing lists total assets of almost $1.28 million and total liabilities of just over $1.3 million.

Sasson said it would be hard to find artists in the United States who would be interested in doing the work, and “the costs would go a lot higher.”

He’s now pursuing other opportunities while also doing some consulting.

“Sometimes those pivots in life are things you are forced to do, and it’s not fun, and it’s not comfortable,” Sasson said.

However, he said he has a lot of contacts and friends willing to help.

“I feel like I have experience and talent that I could use to be successful.”

Sasson said he has no doubt he’ll weather this and eventually start another company.

“Yes, absolutely.”

This story was originally published June 24, 2025 at 11:23 AM.