MyHabit

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

~ the obituary ~

Amazon announced MyHabit on 3 May 2011 and started selling at nine that morning, Pacific time. The format was already established by then: a limited run of discounted designer clothing that was up for a day or two and gone when it was gone. Gilt Groupe had made the model famous in the United States and Vente-Privee had invented it in France before that, and by 2011 the flash sale was the most fashionable thing in online retail.

Amazon's angle was to remove the velvet rope. Gilt and its imitators ran on invitations and waiting lists because scarcity was the point, and MyHabit let anyone in for free and instantly. That looked like a straightforward improvement and it quietly removed the thing the format ran on. If nobody has to be invited, there is no reason to check at nine.

It got real resources for a while. Maria Renz, an Amazon vice president who had come up running its shoes and jewelry categories, ran it as president. There was a buying team, a separate iPhone app, and a site design that looked nothing like Amazon on purpose, because the whole point was to sell brands that did not want to be seen sitting next to a garden hose.

~ the case file ~

~ the flash-sale decade ~

MyHabit never shipped outside the United States, so this is a category I read about rather than one that ever had my address in it. That turns out to be the norm rather than the exception with flash sales, because the model depended on a retailer having local warehouse space full of last season's unsold inventory and a local customer base impatient enough to check daily.

The whole category peaked around 2012 and then deflated. Ideeli sold cheap in 2014, and Fab.com burned through more than three hundred million dollars before being sold for scrap. Gilt, valued at over a billion in 2011, went to Hudson's Bay in January 2016 for two hundred and fifty million. MyHabit closed four months after that, and it is hard to read the timing as coincidence.

~ the date on the door ~

Every contemporary report says the same thing: Amazon confirmed on 21 April 2016 that MyHabit would close "at the end of May". Nobody printed a day. Recode, Fortune, Racked and WWD all filed on 21 April and all of them left it vague, and that vagueness is what has been repeated ever since.

The site answered the question itself. The page sitting on myhabit.com through June 2016 reads "MyHabit is closed" and then tells you your login will still work on Amazon.com "following the MyHabit site closure on May 20, 2016". As far as I can find, that farewell page is the only place the exact date survives.

~ what amazon kept ~

Clothing kept the budget. Amazon spent the following two years launching private-label apparel brands at a rate nobody outside the company could track, and by 2018 it was one of the largest clothing sellers in the United States. MyHabit was the experiment that established the department, and then the department decided it did not need a separate storefront to run one sale a day.

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