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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

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nightski·

I use Stitch Fix and personally I don't care. So far the selections have been great.

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.

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I mean the whole gimmick is about off-loading hard-to-sell inventory at immense mark-ups by bundling items together. Yea some absurd combinations will be sent back but it will still profit an order of magnitude more then displaying it in a department store for months. A lot more room for JIT style and data-driven logistics without the lag-time of presenting within a store.

You can't be that mad at a company when it is so obvious what their value proposition and consequences are to a consumer.

You can see the difference in recommendation by something like Trunk Club which has the entire Nordstrom catalog to pull from. The stylists who work there also tend to be higher quality.

The difficulty with JIT/data-driven logistics in this context is that Stitch Fix's styled offering (the "Fix" boxes) all has to be fulfilled from a single distribution center. So you need not only to predict demand for particular articles of clothing but to ensure that there's sufficient inventory of items to go along with them. It's easy to get people to buy one piece and return four, but does that sound more like a "personal styling service" or a subscription box?

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