The headline buries the big number: They claim a whopping 1/3 of the workforce quit after the announcement.<p>But they also buried the other big factor: They offered everyone $1000 to quit. They also didn't actually completely end flexible working hours, they just raised the minimum working hours to 20 per week and required that they be performed during core hours:<p>> employees would now be required to work at least 20 hours per week on a set schedule during regular business hours; their log-on and log-off times would be tracked, and stylists would at least temporarily no longer be allowed to become full-time employees. Those who couldn’t work within the new rules were offered a $1,000 bonus to quit<p>So it's not as simple as the headline makes it sound. It would have been helpful to know how many of those employees who quit were already working the minimum of 20 hours per week during core hours.<p>If they lost a lot of key workers, that's a big deal. If they lost a lot of people putting in a few hours here and there and those workers got $1000 for it, then this is a non-story. I suppose we can't really know.<p>From personal experience: Flexible work is great, but infinitely flexible working hours quickly becomes a huge pain. Without setting core hours and minimums, you end up with a long tail of workers who want to put in a couple hours here and there at weird hours. This might work if you workload is 100% asynchronous, requires virtually no training, and has minimal managerial intervention, but eventually the odd hours and inconsistent working schedules take a toll on everyone else who has to work around the flex employees. Constraining flex hours to certain windows and requiring a minimum is actually a very reasonable policy, IMO.
> The new CEO, she said, “thinks that the [technology] can do better than us, and that clients don’t care ... that there’s not a person behind the computer.”<p>That's surprising. The only reason I've ever considered Stitch Fix is specifically because there might be a person with better taste than me on the other end.<p>An algorithm is just going to give me a mix of what's popular and what I've liked in the past, which is precisely the information I already had before coming to their service. Wouldn't people eventually realize they don't need to be told to keep buying things they already like?<p>I'd be more interested if they not only kept the people around, but doubled down on having consistent relationships and interaction between stylists and clients.
Wow, they <i>had</i> 1500 employees? That's a lot of ... shipping? shopping? customer service?<p>I'd laugh if the shareholders fired the CEO over a boneheaded move like that, since (at least in my mind) it would seem replacing 1500 people is not a good use of the organization's time and energy and such an exodus was self inflicted
I was an early adopter of their service and I've noticed the quality has gone down hill the past year or two. About the same time they went public. I'm not too surprised to hear of internal issues.
i was a stylist (left few months ago). even though management would always tell us they don't plan to replace us with AI, it was pretty clear they were lying.
This sounds like a great opportunity for those ~500 past employees. 500 is a pretty big number to start a competing business that would work for the employees the way they wanted it to.<p>> “We knew from the beginning we were teaching the algorithm,” said an East Coast–based stylist who requested anonymity because she still works at the company. “We know the ultimate goal of Stitch Fix was to get rid of us.”<p>I have a hard time with the above statement. If you "know" you are training your replacement, or believe you are, and stay anyway, and then you get replaced/eliminated... that just seems to ignore the writing on the wall and being upset post fact when you had full knowledge of it up front, or so you say. It rings kind of hollow. I understand losing a job is an emotional gut punch, even if you're kind of expecting it.
For years, Stitch Fix stylists have been training Stitch Fix ML models to do their jobs. Now the CEO doesn’t need them and showed them the door. This is just the way of doing it which makes the company seem like a victim of its own incompetence instead of a ruthless capitalist automating its people out of their jobs.
I wonder how much of this help Stitch Fix stock narrative (and bottom line).<p>Stitch Fix has market valuation as if they are a tech company (due to unique machine algorithm cloth matching).<p>Having 1,000s of employees is counter to that narrative and might make wall street reassess their valuation.
Is Stitch Fix one of those podcast advertiser regulars? I feel like I've heard about them before even though I'm not anywhere near their target audience, and podcasts are a good way to reach people who are not in your target audience.
"One Midwest-based employee said she had started working for Stitch Fix on top of her full-time day job..."<p>...and that is why the current levels of remote work aren't going to completely stick. I work remotely, but I also am not a "permanent" employee, so the fact that I can work for more than one company at a time is fine, because they haven't hired me as an employee. Most companies are not looking for that, or if they are it's a consultant/contractor, not an employee with benefits. If you're working for more than one company at a time, you're not an "employee", rather those companies are your customers. It's a different relationship. If you want that flexibility, you'll probably have to give up the (alleged) security that goes with being an employee, and just work as a consultant or contractor.