Online Retailer Zulily is Shutting Down

Online retailer Zulily is shutting down. Writing on the company's homepage, an official said Zulily's leadership had "made the difficult but necessary decision to conduct an orderly wind-down of the business to maximize value for the companies' creditors." From a report: Launched in 2010 and based in Seattle, Zulily specialized in children's and women's apparel. It went public in 2013, and at one point was valued at approximately $9 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The retailer was long considered a staple of Seattle's tech scene, and in 2019 signed a multiyear sponsorship deal with the Major League Soccer team Seattle Sounders. More recently, Zulily became known for its aggressive advertising across social media platforms. Further reading: 'Office Space' Inspired Engineer's Theft Scheme, Police Say.

Tech scene?

[RightwingNutjob]

Is walmart part of the tech scene? Is Amazon?

They both have to have "tech" to operate, but when most non-techies think of either walmart jobs or amazon jobs, they think warehouse work, retail floor, and delivery driver jobs, not tech.

Re:

[middlemen]

Amazon has been on the forefront of Tech for over 25 years and people go through 8 hour grueling tech interviews to just get a job there.

Re: Tech scene?

[RightwingNutjob]

A whole lot more people go through a much less rigorous process to work in a warehouse or drive a truck.

When Amazon announced a white collar footprint expansion in Massachusetts a few years back, a whole lot of posts on non-techie local forums were automatically thinking "more jobs" meant more minimum wage and gig jobs in fulfillment, not tech jobs.

Gotta get outside your bubble.

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[Opportunist]

And I really, really wonder why. They are by no means the best or most interesting employer available.

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[micheas]

Amazon runs at a scale that they have problems that other places don't have.

Take replacing dead drives in servers. For most companies, this is a relatively rare event that you just deal with as a drive fails. You take a cart and a new drive, go to the computer, pull out the old drive, and swap in the new drive.

At Amazon, there are so many computers, that they have an expected value of drives failing this hour that is far greater than 10. At this point, you start having the problem of what is the most effici

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[xanthos]

?? You need to get out more. Your description of server storage is so 80's.

Re: Tech scene?

[Fortnite_Beast]

The website outage that followed their layoff of the tech staff should have qualified for Slashdot. I don't know if the full bankruptcy story is on topic, though

Re: Tech scene?

[LindleyF]

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple. All kinda in the same conversation tech-wise. Walmart....less so.

who?

[freedomlinux]

News for Nerds?
Stuff that Matters?

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[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Yeah, never heard of them before either. And that one-time $9bn valuation doesn't make them any more newsworthy because valuation and value are two different things.

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[Ickyban]

My only knowledge of them came from web ads (although I never bothered to click on them and assumed they were some crappy offshore vendor like Shein).

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[test321]

and assumed they were some crappy offshore vendor like Shein

According to Wikipedia you were not far from truth. "It held no inventory, instead consolidating shipments of vendor-owned merchandise at its fulfillment centers, or drop shipping directly to customers.[7][8][9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Basically a drop shipping website, that could have operated nearly the same as a seller on Amazon and similar.

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[0xG]

More recently, Zulily became known for its aggressive advertising across social media platforms.

That's why *I* never heard of them...

Non-Paywalled article

[Pascoea]

FFS mods. Do your job. Here's a non-paywalled version of the NYT article. https://www.geekwire.com/2022/... [geekwire.com]

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[Paradise Pete]

Here's a non-paywalled version of the NYT article.

Thanks. Jeez the guy wasn't too bright, siphoning shipping fees and then charging shipping twice, drawing attention to the shipping.

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[Pascoea]

I got a good chuckle out of that too. What a knucklehead.

In other words...

[TwistedGreen]

Yet another drop shipper of low-quality Chinese merchandise closes its doors. Good riddance.

But they sponsored a soccer team!

Re:In other words...

[Opportunist]

But they sponsored a soccer team!

That translates to "overcharged their customers enough to blow the cash on vanity bullshit"

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[trawg]

To be fair if they actually got to the pint they were overcharging customer, they did a lot better than many other tech companies, who would have had to blow venture capital dollars to achieve the same thing.

Breaking News! (cough, cough)

[WoodstockJeff]

Forbes had this on Christmas. IHeart Media had it "just" two days later, quoting Forbes. And NBC found out about it today?

Will it be on ABC tomorrow?

Didnâ(TM)t notice Amazonâ¦

[rwrife]

Interviewed at the Seattle office about 5 years ago and asked why the kept feeding their competitor (Amazon) by using their cloud services. The manager replied that Amazon didnâ(TM)t see them as a competitor and had no threat from Amazon stealing their revenue. I tried to explain that I was fairly certain that Jeff Bezos would sell out his mother for $1, and running over Zulily would be minor speed bump.

Zulily was quite a large operation

[SeriousTube]

My love Annie was a clothes addict. She died a year ago. Her favorite place to shop was Zulily. Some of you have the idea this was some small operation. It was not. It was purchased by QVC for 2.4 billion dollars in 2013 and had over 2 million customers. then was sold to some company last May. When Annie died last January she had 800 pounds of clothes I donated, a large proportion from Zulily. It doesn't matter to me if they went out of business or not but wanted to put some perspective on the size of their operation.

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[x_t0ken_407]

Sorry for your loss brother.