ideeli

» see ideeli.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

us women on the daily-fashion-email circuit used ideeli. anyway, that was not my crowd. on a turkish credit card from ankara in '06, none of these sites were shipping to me. the flash-sales fashion segment was a us-and-canada coded shopping category that did the timed-discount thing on a daily cadence, and the international shipping logistics never quite reached europe at scale, never mind turkey.

paul hurley and mark uhrmacher started ideeli in new york in 2006 around an email list with a daily set of fashion items at discount, available for about 36 to 48 hours then gone. the original idea had been a social-media-marketing platform, but they pivoted when consumers turned out to respond to the flash-sales model that gilt groupe and rue la la were running. by '09 the site was carrying about 1.5 million members.

the growth curve from 2008 to 2010 was the part that made the financial press pay attention. revenue jumped from a few million to 77 million across two years. anyway, inc magazine ranked ideeli the fastest growing private company in america in 2011, ahead of every saas startup and consumer app in the room. the company had raised around 70 million through three rounds by then.

this is where the flash-sales segment hit its ceiling. anyway, gilt groupe ran into the same wall, so did rue la la. you can build a daily-email funnel with millions of subscribers if you have the brand catalog. the unit economics get hard once amazon and nordstrom open their own off-price channels. through 2012 and 2013 ideeli kept the revenue but the margins thinned. in january of 2014 groupon bought the company for 43 million. by 2016 the standalone unit was gone.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

the product was not complicated. you joined the list, the daily email came at 11 in the morning. you clicked the link, you bought before the timer expired. the catalog leaned premium without being top luxury, mostly mid-market designer brands moving last-season inventory at 40 to 70 percent off (close enough).

in those days the back-end was the part that mattered. flash-sales operators ran their own warehouses because the timed-inventory model needed exact stock counts and overnight shipping. ideeli had a fulfillment center in new jersey and a separate one in nevada by 2012. that infrastructure was part of what made the company valuable. it was also part of what made it expensive to run.

~ the groupon end ~

this part you had to be in the us to actually feel, sorta. groupon's flash-sales merger play started in 2013 with the buy of ticket monster in korea. ideeli was the us-side acquisition, paid in cash in january of 2014. the press release said groupon would run ideeli as a standalone unit, anyway, the standard line for that kind of deal.

in august of 2014 the brand got renamed to ideel. for whatever reason, the rebrand was framed as a loyalty-program relaunch with a shorter name and tighter copy. by august of 2015 groupon was filing layoff notices for 39 ideel employees, then 63 more in november for a chicago relocation. by 2016 the standalone fashion-flash brand was effectively over. groupon paid 43 million in january of 2014 to own a brand it dismantled across the next two years.

~ the legacy ~

the flash-sales era ran from about 2007 to 2014 in the us retail-tech press, then more or less ended. gilt sold to hudson's bay in 2016 for around 250 million, a fraction of the billion-dollar valuation it had carried in 2011. rue la la limped on. ideeli got bought and then ground down. anyway, the daily-discount email model survived inside amazon and nordstrom rack. the standalone-brand version did not.

in those days the deeper lesson was probably that the timed-inventory funnel needed brand catalog more than user growth. by '14 the off-price market had been claimed by amazon and nordstrom and tj maxx. there was no room left for a flash-sales site to sit in the middle. anyway, ideeli was the largest casualty of that consolidation by employee count.

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