Birchbox Cuts About 12% of Staff | Hacker News Reader

Birchbox Cuts About 12% of Staff

wsj.com

48 pointsMattRogish42 comments

I've been a subscriber since nearly the beginning but I'm not renewing. The service itself has become incredibly subpar and they've screwed up quite a few times. Add in the fact that they force you to use points or they expire and the products are always overpriced. They had a bunch of customers and I imagine I'm not the only one who no longer sees the value. This tells me more about their product no longer holding the same value more so than the current technology situation.

Same experience here. I regret buying a yearly subscription as I just received the same product two months in a row and another one I got a couple months back.

I got the man box and was pleasantly surprised that I actually ordered some of the items (after a few boxes not ordering anything).

It's a shame they are losing Liz Crawford, she's top notch. I'll be curious to see where she ends up next.

How in the world is duplication not something they check for?

Maybe the 'box' industry will finally tone it down a bit. Who really needs this kind of stuff so frequently?

"rethink cost structures" - says the CEO. Well, don't be in manhattan. Go to Nebraska or Idaho or something.

Bulu Box[0] is a subscription box startup that did exactly that (headquartered in Lincoln, NE).

[0]:http://www.bulubox.com/

Wow, you have a box subscription for snake oil and diet pills? Sign me up!

Is there any precedent of a start up doing this? I'd imagine a lot of their engineer talent would be lost, but I'm happy to be proved wrong.

There's a difference between losing engineering talent and not being able to get engineering talent.

I don't think there'd be much trouble on the engineering side. Let's be honest, there's not much tech in box-o-the-month services. It's the business and marketing folks that benefit from being in the dynamic cities.

The problem is the sales order flow and fulfillment / operations at scale (which is an engineering challenge).

When you're in a growth period that's easy to discount, your challenge is (and should be!) top-line revenue. But in a crunch shaving 20-50% of order processing and fulfillment costs is mana from heaven, creating profit where one there was only red ink. That takes a hand-rolled system, and ops-eng is hard and requires very specialized knowledge.

Maybe in a conventional ecommerce company but monthly boxes are infinitely easier to manage ops-wise. You only have a dozen or so SKUs, know exactly how much you need weeks in advance and have months to plan everything out.

Actually, I believe birchbox does heavy customization and tailoring of boxes to individuals.

tl;dr: so you haven't actually implemented a scale ops system, eh?

A) Shipping pre-packed boxes is not substantially easier. Order assembly/fulfillment is not the hard part of ops. Sort of like HTML is not the hard part of web development. It's just the part laypeople experience first-hand.

B) Birchbox is investing a lot in follow-on ecommerce sales of the same products they ship monthly anyways, so they don't get to make simplifying assumptions.

C) Birchbox is substantially harder than a traditional pick&pack setup. It's unique enough that they have to build their own model, makeup is perishable (so skus aren't fungible!), they have hundreds of small providers by design, and their sku set cycles fully every month or two.

Source: I built system & ops for a company with both a subscription business and substantial real-time eCommerce ops, which is comparable in size to Birchbox USA.

I interviewed for a very senior finance role at a public company a few days ago.

The entire group of analysts and managers is based in a southern US state, while the executive team resides in NYC. Pretty crazy, but makes sense from a business stand point.

The question is: Could the exec team haved have lived in that state?

The question is: Could you have hired that exec team if it wasn't going to be based in NYC?

The question is: Do most executives actually deliver enough value compared to their pay? (No)

cuz there's a lot of successful startups coming out of Nebraska and Idaho!

I still enjoy my regularly delivered artisan hummus, but I'm weird like that.

Mmmm hummus. I'm going to start a box-box company, every month we send you a random box companies box. Actually, this doesn't sound so bad...

Actually that is a pretty good idea

A startup is usually the most willing to give a good deal for their first "big" (ha) order

So, usually you are just getting a startup's best offer to a startup box company.

I had a phone interview with them and then checked their glassdoor. Needless to say I'm not surprised about this.

these monthly box things are great for xmas gifts, but get old fast

And are usually significantly overpriced.

I was a member of dollar shave club then realized it took me half a year to use just 1 box.

I'm quite lazy and the razors are incredibly frustrating to open so I end up just using 1 as long as possible. So I just quit my subscription and when I need new razors I sign up again. Funny thing is the first month they always give you a free shaver with the razors so it works out well for me. I want my money's worth, damn it.

I have at least 15 packs of those blades in my house. I finally got around to canceling...

Just buy directly from Dorco on Amazon as needed. Dollar Shave just rebrands Dorco products and marks them up.

I've always been impressed that Dollar Shave Club was able to build a business around selling a single product available on Amazon for a higher price.

I see the humour in it, but Amazon calls it a "reusable" good.

Why wouldn't you just buy razors at once in bulk? I can't figure out why Dollar Shave exists.

"X startup cuts 10-15% of staff" seems to be a meme lately.

Why must we always link to Pay Wall articles... :'(

Search for the article in Google to get around the paywall.

It still throws up the paywall for me. This article probably has the same info minus the annoyance: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160628/TECHNOLOGY/160...

For WSJ if you click the 'web' link above you'll get taken to the Google result page for this article.

Another way is add /amp/ to the URL before /articles (ie http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/birchbox-cuts-about-12-of-st...).

Sometimes it will do a subscription request but there are ways around that as well if you look at the network inspector to see what it's requesting..

Click the web link. Then click news on the Google search page.

I wish paywalled articles would link automatically to the web link, it would save time.

I just use this chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bypass/ekfnpmbmfml...

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