Lockerz, the heavily-funded social commerce startup, has reportedly laid off a chunk of its staff and closed down an office in San Diego. TechCrunch reports that about 30 percent of the staff at the headquarters in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood lost their jobs in the restructuring, including chief product officer Michael Walton.

We’ve reached out to some of our sources about the layoffs, and we’ll update this post as we learn more.

UPDATELeilani Augustine, the chief marketing officer at Lockerz, said that the company raised a significant amount of cash last fall and has enough money in the bank  to keep building out the product. Here’s more Augustine:

“Yesterday, we went through the process of realigning our organizational structure to best fit the needs of our product and business as we move forward.  That means that some positions were eliminated and we will be increasing our investment in other areas (as) we see opportunity.  We remain bullish on the opportunities surrounding social commerce.  We believe we are in the early stages of a transformational change in the way consumers discover and consume products and content. Our vision remains the same and yesterday’s changes will allow us to be much more nimble, which is an important component of success in this space.”

Lockerz is among the most heavily funded Internet startups in Seattle, having raised more than $65 million from marquee investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, former Microsoft CFO Greg Maffei; DAG Ventures, Live Nation and others.

Kathy Savitt

Lockerz has purchased a number of companies in the past 24 months, including Seattle area startups Off & Away and Wishpot. At the time of its acquisition of Chick Approved last May, Lockerz employed about 60 people. 

Lockerz was founded by former PR and Amazon.com executive Kathy Savitt, who left the company last summer to become chief marketing officer at Yahoo. At the time of Savitt’s departure, Lockerz promoted former Amazon.com executive Mark Stabingas to the CEO role. 

Citing an unnamed source, TechCrunch reports that Lockerz traffic has “died” — falling from as many as 40 million unique visitors to about 15 to 20 million monthly visitors.

Founded in 2009, Lockerz is creating a social shopping service where teenagers and twenty-somethings earn points for sharing content or watching videos.

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