“My skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel.”

Though Temu is best known today as a place to pay low prices for inaccurately represented goods, it was not always so. When it was founded by Oscar "Temu" Temunsson in 1817, it was made to be an auction house for the finest goods like Southernby's or Christianne's.

The downfall began nearly as soon as Temu went online, with "online" in 1817 referring to it being a building on London's wealthy "King's Line" road near Westminster. Buyers were always satisfied with Temu's guarantee, which was included in The Guarantee of Guarantee, signed in Guarantee, London- The first official Guarantee ever to be guaranteed.

But then in 1819, the Cracks began to show. James and Lynda Crack were infamous in the Americas for showing merchandise that did not in the end reflect what the customer would buy. As such, they were banished from the United States, a young country at that time known as "Some States That Don't Yet Hate Each Other." Arriving in London, they forged papers to begin selling at Temu.

The damage to Temu's reputation was bad, but not fatal. Temunsson himself tried to repair the house's image by selling several notorious items, including the world's largest Yorkshire Pudding (At 870 Pounds), the most adopted dog (At 19 Pounds), and the most flattened Matzo ever smashed flat by numerous strikes with a mallet (At 3300 Pounds), all of which sold for over ten thousand pounds sterling. The company lasted as a respectable entity well into the 1900s as a result.

In 1949 though, another blow was blown to Temu, and boy how it blew. Hurricane Pholacio made landfall on the beaches of London and ruined the prized collection of Candy Floss (Known as "Gummy Bear" in Modern English) sculptures that Temu had on display. No insurer would take the job, as you have to get insurers before the disaster happens, and Temu had to sell its physical location to make ends meet.

Disembodied, Temu began to haunt other stores and manufacturers, sucking on their revenues and leaving them desiccated. So it lurked, weakened, for decades until Etsy came along. Etsy was, in past times, a resource where artists could sell their wares. Unfortunately, Temu drop(shipped) upon it and sucked it dry of any chance for legitimate creators to thrive. Temu grew more and more powerful until it became the economic disaster (or "Nosferatemu") it is today.

Nosferatu (2024) dir. Robert Eggers