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.
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?
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.
If the ex-workers in the article are representative, they aren't trained stylists at all; they're housewives and other normal people looking for extra income. Using StitchFix is basically letting your Uber driver select your wardrobe.
That's exactly the same thing a human stylist would do + making sure the outfit pieces look good together (Which I assume the algorithm is also trained to do).
As much as I want to believe that a human in the end would do a better job, I think an algorithm is capable of becoming a more accurate and dynamic stylist than a human.
Unless you want to be a trend-setter or do some artistic expression through your clothing. In those cases a human stylist does make sense. But for the regular Joe, I think a well trained algorithm can perform better than a human.
An algorithm will aim to make you look similar to what other people like you look like. It will not push boundaries or riff on creative 'happy accidents' because it can't.
A real stylist will do those things and more.
I don't know whether it's an age thing or just pure cognitive dissonance because people in tech have the hubris to think we can optimise and improve everything because technology, but this machine-learning nihilist thinking is profoundly sad.
So a human (usually with a fashion background and retail experience) is going to be able to perform better in pretty much every scenario with their algorithm “helping”
It sounds like the stylist is provided data from an algorithm already any way and just fine tunes the selections.
Not only that they have a lot of ways to build out the style you already received which is great.
You can't be that mad at a company when it is so obvious what their value proposition and consequences are to a consumer.
OMG. The compliments. From co-workers, random people on the street and staff in stores. I was shopping for a nice watch for my wife, went to a place and was ignored but saw a watch, went back a few days later in my new clothes, and the same staff was super friendly and helpful. It really changed how I viewed the importance of style and fit.
People who are as picky as you outlined self-select out of services like this.
What they have that the customer doesn't, is knowledge of the space of products that may match your taste. They also know more brands than you do, and may match you with one that you weren't aware of. Like most services, we can do it ourselves, but we pay others because we don't have the time.
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:
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> While the new policy requires that stylists be available at least 20 hours per week, company guidelines reviewed by BuzzFeed News said they can be scheduled for as little as zero hours as “availability does not guarantee a certain number of working hours each week."
The company's executive has continually failed at PR though, which is hammering the stock price. Unbelievable that they're letting this narrative just persist.
As if it’s in their purview to control. Ask the poor PR folks at CFA (chicken QSR)
These are always equivalent in my experience. I've never seen a company that didn't use "core hours" to mean some large window centered around the middle of the day.
I've noticed that Buzzfeed News almost always intentionally buries these crucial details to create sensationalist pieces.
If the domain were banned from HN, I wouldn't be upset.
Your assumption of things aren’t close, and they didn’t lose employees who barely worked. They lost employees who have anything else going on between the hours of 8-8 between Tues-Sat, and worked the job for flexibility..
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
It wasn't just quitting. They were offered $1000 in severance. Only a third of the workers took the offer.
It seems like they're trying to get consistency from fewer staff that are more focused on the job. And less costly to employ. That, or eventually replace them with algorithmic picking.
The company missed revenue targets, lost multiple senior staff, and the new CEO is from Bain capital. They're doing this on purpose.
That explains the introduction of black-box management-solely-via-P&L. If any position could be automated away, one would think that that sort of CEO could...
Shopping algorithms seem really good at finding very similar items in my experience. That's great when I'm shopping for a cheap router, or some other commodity. When shopping for something like clothing, you frequently want VERY dissimilar items to compare, OR you want complementary, but differently categorized items.
Get rid of the human touch at your own peril. Especially when your business model is built on taste.
Looking at stitch fix pricing it is not cheap. It looks a lot like you would expect somewhere like Nordstrom's to price. It's worth noting that Nordstrom's is more than happy to have an employee act as a personal stylist at no cost.
Is it just the cost of scheduling these workers?
...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.
Most of these individuals don’t want this scenario, they would much rather have one full time job that paid the bill. But with minimum wage in the US basically being a glorified slave-wage, that’s not a realistic ambition for many people.
> “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.”
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.
Stitch Fix has market valuation as if they are a tech company (due to unique machine algorithm cloth matching).
Having 1,000s of employees is counter to that narrative and might make wall street reassess their valuation.
