Zulily, a once high-flying “flash sale” website that sold jewelry among its mom-centered offerings, has shut down—and it’s blaming Amazon for its demise.

The long-rumored liquidation was confirmed on Zulily’s homepage, which said the e-tailer has “made the difficult but necessary decision to conduct an orderly wind-down of the business” and has entered into an assignment for the benefit of creditors (ABC)—a bankruptcy alternative that transfers a company’s assets into a trust for distribution to creditors.

Industry veteran and designer Robert Manse tells JCK the site sold “quite a bit of jewelry” but didn’t always pay vendors promptly—even though it operated on a “flash sale” model where it only purchased what was sold. He says he and other jewelry brands are still owed money by the site.

Mark Vadon and Darrell Cavens, both veterans of Blue Nile, founded Zulily in 2009. They chose the name “with the help of a branding agency because it was easy to say and just as important, it wouldn’t limit what they could sell,” according to Fast Company.

Zulily went public, with a $2.6 billion valuation, in 2013 and was purchased by QVC (now Qurate) in 2015 for $2.4 billion. The Wall Street Journal portrayed QVC’s acquisition as a defensive move against the biggest name in e-commerce, Amazon. “Being an e-commerce company in the U.S. has increasingly come to mean one thing: figuring out how to coexist with Amazon.com,” the newspaper wrote.

But Zulily didn’t fare well under its new owner—and, after years of losses, Los Angeles-based private equity firm Regent bought it in May 2023 for an undisclosed sum. At the time, Regent’s chairman, Michael Reinstein, declared that “the company [would] return to its entrepreneurial roots as an independent business.” In the end, Regent kept the site open for less than eight months before shutting it down.

Zulily was long believed to be in trouble—in December, Geekwire reported it was closing its fulfillment centers and Seattle headquarters and laying off hundreds of employees. That same month, Zulily filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, charging that Amazon coerced vendors who sold on both sites to raise their Zulily prices so they didn’t undercut Amazon’s. It claimed that some sellers were threatened with banishment from the Amazon Marketplace, which jeopardized “their very survival.”

The results were stark, according to the suit: “In just one year’s time, Amazon’s conduct resulted in nearly half of the suppliers who sold to both Amazon and Zulily to end their relationships with Zulily.”

Amazon told Retail Dive the allegations were “false.”

(Photo courtesy of Zulily)

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