Amazon just killed its flash sale site and moved the CEO to its fashion team
According to a report by fashion news site WWD, MyHabit will close by the end of May, as Amazon plans to simplify its fashion offerings and narrow its focus on building Amazon Fashion, the team that's creating a number of Amazon-owned fashion labels.
Garth Mader, the CEO of MyHabit, has already moved on to Amazon Fashion as its general manager. He is in charge of hiring and building the fashion team, according to his LinkedIn page.
MyHabit launched back when online flash sales was a growing market. Companies like Gilt raised hundreds of millions of dollars based on a flash sales model that offered designer items for a limited time exclusively to its own members.
But flash sales soon lost steam, and Gilt, the market leader that was once valued at nearly $1 billion, ended up selling itself for about $250 million this year. Amazon typically doesn't disclose numbers for its smaller ventures, but it's likely that MyHabit failed to see much traction, given its quiet closure.
Instead, Amazon seems fully committed to expanding its fashion business. It was recently discovered that Amazon has quietly launched 7 private label fashion brands, with thousands of product listings. Amazon's job site also shows that the company's ramping up hiring on the fashion side, with job descriptions that say, "When you think of buying new clothing, shoes, watches and jewelry, do you think of Amazon? Not yet? Well, we are going to change that."
Amazon is known for experimenting with new business ideas and quickly shutting them down if they fail to show much growth. Just recently, it killed its daily deals site called Amazon Local.
Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment.