The headline buries the big number: They claim a whopping 1/3 of the workforce quit after the announcement.
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.
According to the article the minimum working hours isn't 20 hours a week, they are forcing their employees to block off 20 hours during core working times to be available in case Stitch Fix wants them. If Stitch Fix guaranteed those 20 hours were paid I'd be more understanding.
> 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."
This. This was basically a lay off in disguise, and yet it's being portrayed as the opposite. Stichfix has continually automated many of their processes using their 100+ data scientists. This is no different.
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.
That's if you beleive the scientists are there for the product instead of being there for the investors. I don't know about stitch fix but there's a lot of unrealistic "Oh we're going to automate away all our staffing costs"
> They also didn't actually completely end flexible working hours, they ... required that they be performed during core hours
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.
This doesn’t, however, make sense because Stitch Fix’s core hours cause entirely too many employees to be on the server at one time. Last week, the server went down at exactly 8 am every single day because it was the first hour stylist were allowed to be on. It also went down for 3 hours on Wednesday. Stitch Fix is not equipped to have this many employees on the server during these core hours. If the server goes down, you are to move your hours or take a pay cut— whether you are part time or full time. This is exactly what stylists saw coming, so they bowed out.
You obviously don’t have any real insight into the company or the changes that were made. There aren’t employees putting in a “few hours here and there”, and the minimum commitment previously was 15 hours. They’ve restructured scheduling policies to a very large degree from how it’s operated for almost 10 years. They now require exact time-shift commitments to the minute, for multiple hours within a tight schedule timeframe, and you still are on-call. Before you were able to schedule anywhere from 15-29 hours and you would set hours during the day that you could complete around your own schedule.
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..
> The new CEO, she said, “thinks that the [technology] can do better than us, and that clients don’t care ... that there’s not a person behind the computer.”
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.
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.
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.
I'd venture a guess that the average "normal person" is better at picking out clothing than I am, so I don't see the problem with this. Vanishingly few people who choose clothes for others, whether it's a Stitch Fix, Nordstrom, or styling celebrities, are "trained stylists." It's about taste, not training.
> An algorithm is just going to give me a mix of what's popular and what I've liked in the past.
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.
This is just a misunderstanding of how creative people work vs algorithms.
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.
> 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.
And your comment:
> 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.
Correct - I think that's what most people want. Style is defined at the high end to a very limited audience and derivative variations of it are built on further derivative variations as it flows down the classes until it so distorted it simply dissolves. Every turn of that crank is another group of people trying to look like other people (and thus offending the tastes of the group being copied).
> Style is defined at the high end to a very limited audience and derivative variations of it are built on further derivative variations as it flows down the classes
That trickle-down definition of style is relevant perhaps within some groups of people.
I think that most subcultures have their own highly independent styles, and within that you have people with their own independent riffs on the general subculture style.
Do you not think that many subcultures have their own style that isn’t derivative/trickle-down?
For sure. Certain subcultures have aesthetics that are not started at the top. However, these subcultures at times could be thought of as culturally elite (and very much adored by upper class tastemakers) and their fashion in some cases manages the same derivative cycle. For instance, “Grunge” culture which had an aesthetic that was very much not haute of course. But it was culturally elite at the time and very quickly their styles were derived for mainstream consumption. But even so, haute will deconstruct the parts they like, integrate it, and so it passes.
Other subcultures of course never break through.
Regardless, most clothing is purchased from retailers that mass produce things. You could probably tier rank them accordingly from designers to boutiques to small retailers on up to big box shops that you can find anywhere.
You see the same thing in other cultural artifacts like cuisine. Haute Cuisine doesn’t start every trend but it isn’t afraid to discover something outside the mainstream, riff on it, and then it works it’s way into the middle.
A real stylist can do that, but very well may not. The question is not whether an algorithm/AI can beat stylists at the 90th percentile of how great they are, it's whether it can beat stylists at the 50th percentile.
I don't disagree with what you're saying in a general sense. Creative people output will be better and higher quality than an algorithm...But I don't think that's the case for this business model.
Although I believe there is creative merit in composing an clothing outfit I don't believe that merit is even remotely close to things such as designing the actual clothes or creating the drawings and art that goes into the clothes or designing the stores in which these clothes are sold...
So I stand by my original statement. I do believe an algorithmic stylist for the avergage person can be vastly superior than a human stylist, because the inputs that the former takes are not that different than the inputs of the latter. Furthermore, the reasoning is essentially the same:
People want good fitted clothes, that are in fashion and that go in accordance to what they like. I don't think there's a lot of room for creativity here. I'm sorry that it sounds like a machine-learning nihilist take, but in practice I don't believe there's a good match between what people want from something like Stitch Fix and what a human stylist can do for them.
I dooubt that someone who relates to clothing in an artistic way would ever use something like Stitch Fix, so my assumption is that for the average Stitch Fix user, an algorithmic stylist could give them the same desired output at a better cost.
> 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.
An algorithm can aim to push boundaries and riff on creative 'happy accidents' in ways that people like you like. It's not even that explicit with typical supervised learning/recommenders. It will find things people like you like, whether that means pushing boundaries in ways those people like or just making you look like they like.
I feel the same as you do about ML being in too many places too confidently, but you're assuming a lot about the kinds of algorithms used.
There is no way for you to buck the pattern here since it is using a statistical estimation for whether you like something. You could very well be an outlier datapoint rather than someone in the median, at which point the model fit for you is extremely poor. If you had an actual person on the other end you could tell them explicitly what you want rather than have some likelihood estimation based on metadata that might not have any relevance to this particular decision you are making at this time.
Sorry but could you please give a definition of creativity which is not a weaker or more limited version of mine:
> Creativity is the preference for low(er) priority edges in a graph
There is virtually no difference between an algorithm and a human except that the human may have better heuristics for what "works", which by definition is a form of bias and an algorithm can assess many orders of magnitude more nodes.
If Lee-Sedol the world champion at Go could be left dumbfounded by what he claimed to be a creative move, a move generated by a laptop performing monte-carlo tree search with an ANN doing pruning, and have his world shattered, then I don't see how anyone else could claim that algorithms can't be creative.
If we go by something like this [1]:
> Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. (page 396)
Then the tendency is reweighting of priorities of heuristics, the generation of ideas is walking the varius edges, recognizing is nothing but an evaluation of the new state, and alternatives and posibilities that may be useful is nothing but searching deeper within the graph.
I would appreciate any comments that explain what is wrong with my definition or the comment as a whole. I do not find this downvoting without any form of discussion to be of substance, nor facilitate any discussion, it achieves nothing except leave the author perplexed but without a way of reconciling it, except by assuming that people dislike hearing what they don't want to hear, that is, that human brains are nothing, but heuristic based computational units with lazy evaluation.
Grand parent comment claimed that believing algorithms (and computers) can perform better than humans is hubris, I claim that believing humans are special, is hubris.
The algorithm sends winter coats and three crop tops to someone living in Texas during the summer.. it doesn’t put together outfits, consider seasons, or make selections based on budget/requests/lifestyles/etc.
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”
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.
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?
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.
I'm still wondering how many "stylists" are good enough for the job. Or maybe I'm just too picky and thus find it hard to imagine that many stilists would be able to find what the other person would like without it being too obvious (hey, I noticed you liked blue things. here's another blue one!). In my imagination it's a very thin line between obviousness and misunderstanding (and the fine line being the absolute understanding of the customer).
You also do not want just what "I like". A stylish friend did a shopping trip with me and made me buy stuff I didn't really like: too tight, too colourful, etc. Not outlandish, just way outside my comfort zone. Apparently I look really good in red.
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.
Yes, it's very difficult to tell your style from your photos, social media presence, and explicit instructions provided when you signed up. This is sarcasm if you didn't pick it up.
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.
yeah, you're probably right. It should get easier to find adequate stylings for people who stay longer with the service, as the database fills. And that's probably also the moment where less stylists are needed because your "AI" can do (more of) it.
btw. how they treated their workers judging from the article is absolute appaling and another indictment of gig companies.
It's not like you are getting top-tier fashion designers, interior decorators etc. on services like these. The company has a fixed catalog, decided based on what deals they can get from vendors, and their reps are all outsourced and following a script/reading out algorithmic results.
Would HN recommend Stitch Fix? I was thinking of signing up if there was a personal stylist recommending clothes, but now I’m not sure. How good is the AI in picking a wardrobe?
Wow, they had 1500 employees? That's a lot of ... shipping? shopping? customer service?
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
These were clothing style pickers, and it sounds like the CEO intended to get rid of many or most of them.
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...
Maybe that's how we solve capitalism, we use machine learning to replace the capitalists!
I can't help but imagine that Neutral Planet from Futurama would be the end result of that, constant model fit of the median until the market doesn't even cater to the outliers, and everyone wears the same grey jumpsuit.
Quite right, one might as well speak of replacing vampires with werewolves: it still won't be safe to walk at night! Of course the point is to be rid of them all.
I think the CEO is missing a major point. Their competitive advantage might be that they AREN'T algorithmic.
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.
I have a dark suspicion that their best target market might be to pretend they're not algorithmic, but actually being so.
Most people, almost by definition, have rather ordinary tastes. They will want to imagine that it's slightly better than average, but not outrageous.
I don't know much about fashion, but I see it a lot in food marketing. Restaurants differentiate themselves on trendy but safe choices. It works down from the high end: Gordon Ramsey splashes something with truffle oil, and a few years later you can get New Burger King Truffle Fries. A lot of "mom & pop" restaurants are just heating up things off of Sysco trucks.
I don't mean that to sound snobbish. People should enjoy whatever they like. I'm slightly turned off when it's marketed as being really innovative while smaller, more interesting things languish, but that's just the market at work.
As it applies here, I suspect that most people really could be very happy with algorithmically applied clothing. A truly personal stylist would be much more expensive and outside of most people's comfort zones anyway -- unless they did basically the same thing as the algorithm.
What Stitch Fix can offer is the illusion that you're being truly stylish without any of the risks. Which is a fine thing, as far as I'm concerned, if it makes them happy. That excludes a market which really does want a truly personal, human stylist, but I suspect that market isn't nearly as large, and even smaller if you ask them to pay what hours of attention would really cost.
Adding a very thin veneer of humanity on top would be a big win. Have the AI do most of the work, then have a human being sanity check it and add a personal note (maybe something derived from their conversations... which could itself be mined by the AI and then massaged by a human).
If it's nothing more than "You mentioned that you liked the coat that [celebrity] wore, and this was a similar sort of look but in [color] you said you liked", that could potentially give people a really positive experience. Even if many people are wearing the same coat because the algorithm recommends it.
What sort of costs go into these employees? I think I'm missing something, but not very familiar with costs of a worker who:
* has no benefits
* BYOD
* not eligible for benefits (they are explicitly called out in TFA as not eligible to become employees)
In the long term, they cost more than the code that is just optimizing delivery of what's in the warehouse to "what each consumer has been surveyed as preferring/purchasing".
This seems like an inflection point for the company where their software is starting to be more useful than their employees. It's the equivalent of McDonald's replacing counter people with kiosks.
1500 employees, 1/3rd quit. Supposedly, many of those who quit were working less than 20 hours a week, previously a minimum of 5 hours a week was required. At that rate it would take 8 part time employees to work 40 hours...
I was an early adopter of their service and I've noticed the quality has gone down hill the past year or two. About the same time they went public. I'm not too surprised to hear of internal issues.
i was a stylist (left few months ago). even though management would always tell us they don't plan to replace us with AI, it was pretty clear they were lying.
Every employer wishes magical AI would come along and replace all of their workers. It doesn't mean it's actually a feasible goal. To be honest, if you could build an AI to do what stitch fix does, it probably just devalues what stitch fix does.
This sounds like a great opportunity for those ~500 past employees. 500 is a pretty big number to start a competing business that would work for the employees the way they wanted it to.
> “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.
For years, Stitch Fix stylists have been training Stitch Fix ML models to do their jobs. Now the CEO doesn’t need them and showed them the door. This is just the way of doing it which makes the company seem like a victim of its own incompetence instead of a ruthless capitalist automating its people out of their jobs.
Is Stitch Fix one of those podcast advertiser regulars? I feel like I've heard about them before even though I'm not anywhere near their target audience, and podcasts are a good way to reach people who are not in your target audience.
Yep, big time. If you’ve listened to a podcast regularly in the last five years, you’ve almost definitely heard an ad for them (or similar competitors).
"One Midwest-based employee said she had started working for Stitch Fix on top of her full-time day job..."
...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.
You’re aware that huge swathes of the economy is run by “flexible” labour that doesn’t get any guaranteed hours, and is forced to work 2 or 3 job simultaneously to make ends meet.
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.
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.