Skip to main content

Unlikely Fix

I have long been a fan of Stitch Fix UX but never a customer. What they sell is interesting as a concept but I am not among their buyer personas. For a company that gets customer pain so well judging by the style questions they ask at intake, it was disappointing to read this story about their stylists leaving the company. If the employees are not engaged and satisfied with the job that they do, the negative effects impact the the customer the company seeks to serve. 

While the direct buy options seems sensible at first - there should be enough data by now to curate styles to mimic the work of the stylist. The algorithm may even be a good and useful one, but it takes the human touch out of the whole experience. There is a certain type of customer that gravitated to the Stitch Fix service and having a "personal" stylist was likely a big part of the attraction - a human stylist, not an AI that mimicked one. While the direct buy may bring new and different customers into the fold, it will take away from what this brand was all about. Maybe it was not a business model that was meant to make money or scale like the investors would have wanted, but there is a place for it still. The voice of one stylist that this report cites, says it all:

"A lot of it is the asks from our managers, the top down stuff," the second stylist said. "They're asking us to put an athleisure piece in every single box. I get very few people who request that, but it's my boss making me do that. And she will force me to not send as many shoes, she wants me to push more jewelry. They'll tell you to do what's client-right, but then you still get coached on doing what is Stitch Fix-specific."

Being customer-centric is not easy and often not profitable so there is this eventual desire to pull on the levers that make the company more money. The hope is that the customer remain mostly happy but they make investors happier. Over time the model starts to fall apart because the type of workforce that makes all this magic possible can't and won't stick around as the company tries more and more tweaks away from what customers loved them for.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more