Zulily

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

~ the last words ~

by the time i would have been the customer for zulily, i was neither in the country it served nor the household it was built for. it sold to american moms buying for small kids, and it did it through daily flash sales pushed out by email at dawn. i knew the shape of that business without ever touching this particular one. it is the kind of retailer you read about after it dies, not before.

two former Blue Nile executives, Mark Vadon and Darrell Cavens, launched it out of seattle, going live on 27 january 2010 with children's clothing. the model was the whole trick: limited-time deals that vanished fast, announced in an early-morning email, so opening your inbox felt a little like a treasure hunt. it caught on quickly. by 2012 it had more than ten million members, and it went public in 2013 at twenty-two dollars a share that jumped straight to thirty-nine.

at the top zulily was worth billions and generating real cash. that was the whole reason its ending stings: this was not a company that never found a business. it had one. what it lost was the owners' patience.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the daily-deal format was faster and stranger than a normal store. inventory turned over constantly, with orders often placed to suppliers only after customers had already bought. the site trained shoppers to check in every single morning, and that habit was the asset. for a few years it made zulily one of the standout names in american online retail, the kind of thing business writers held up as proof the flash-sale idea had legs.

~ the actual end ~

QVC's parent bought zulily in 2015 for about 2.4 billion dollars, and it slowly lost the edge that made it special. in may 2023 the parent sold it to a los angeles private-equity firm. seven months later it was over. rather than a public chapter 11, the firm used a quieter legal wind-down, handing the assets to a trustee to pay creditors. the closure started on 22 december 2023 and took the seattle office and the fulfillment centers with it, around 850 people out of work over the holidays. the brand name got bought and relit afterward, but the zulily that meant something was already gone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »