We’ve written in the past about the odd-ball nature of Zulily, the Seattle e-commerce company that runs counter to most retailers, de-emphasizing holiday sales and not worrying too much about ship times.
In remarks today at the 32nd Annual Metropolitan Grill “Guess the Dow” event in Seattle, Zulily CFO Marc Stolzman admitted that Zulily is following a contrarian track, very much “optimizing for a different experience.”
“We are constantly compared against Amazon, and in an Amazon-defined world our model shouldn’t work,” said Stolzman. “But by taking that and saying — ‘We are not trying to be Amazon, we are trying to be us and who we are’ —we have been able to separate ourselves, but in a way that others can’t replicate what we are creating.”
That echoed comments that Zulily co-founder Mark Vadon made at the GeekWire Summit last October, in which the retail entrepreneur noted that the company is “misunderstood” and that if they attempted to go head-to-head with Amazon that they’d get “crushed.”
Even with Zulily’s rapid growth in recent years — it now has 4.5 million active customers and $285 million in quarterly revenue — Stolzman said that “we are a very unsatisfied management team.” Because of that, he said that they are constantly trying to improve the customer experience, sometimes “breaking things” in the process as part of a commitment to experimentation.
Wall Street also has been unsatisfied in recent months with Zulily, with the stock down another four percent today to $20.37, falling below its IPO price. In the past six months, Zulily has lost 44 percent of its value. That slump caused at least two stock pickers at the Guess the Dow luncheon to pick the company for a breakout year in 2015, arguing that much of the carnage is over.
Even with those financial results, Stolzman — the former CFO at Blue Nile and former senior vice president at Starbucks — thinks that the company has the opportunity to change retail in the same way that Facebook changed social networking.
In that regard, Stolzman said he was attracted to the job because there’s the ability to create “an entirely different retail landscape.”
“We are creating something where the brand means different things to different people,” said Stolzman. “We offer a different experience to customers from other e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar players, and we are really trying to separate ourselves by enhancing the difference, instead of trying to run away from it.”
Even though there are big differences between Amazon and Zulily, Stolzman was asked later in his talk about competitors that he admires.
Amazon.com, also started in Seattle, was the first company to roll off his lips.
“You look at what Amazon has been able to do … there is so much in the Amazon playbook that applies to the model that we are creating. That is someone we really look at in terms of how have they been able to do that,” he said.
