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Stories
Leading the Evolution of E-Commerce
Photo via the New York Observer
Photo via the New York Observer
When Jennifer Fleiss (MBA 2009) started Rent the Runway with HBS classmate Jenn Hyman, the pair were in their 20s—two scrappy entrepreneurs who built the concept of renting designer clothing into a business valued earlier this year at $1 billion. In 2017, when Fleiss left, it had 6 million customers and $100 million in revenues. It was time to try something new.
That something new became Jetblack, a text-to-shop service that Fleiss launched this year with longtime mentor Mark Lore. It’s the first company to launch from Walmart’s tech incubator, Store No. 8. “I love the early stages of businesses,” Fleiss told the New York Observer. “I think it’s where I’m my best self and where I have the most value.” This time around, Fleiss has the infrastructure and resources of the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer to draw on, allowing more time to focus on what the consumer wants, she says.
What the consumer wants is what Fleiss—a mother of three—also wants: efficiency and ease of use. “The idea here is to combine the convenience of e-commerce with the personal attention that you’d have with a personal shopper or personal assistant,” she explains. “We’re actually getting back to the interaction you might have had years ago, when you’d walk into a store and interact with a sales associate who’s knowledgeable about the product.”
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