E-commerce company Fab is announcing another round of job cuts tomorrow, laying off between 80 and 90 employees to trim costs as it shifts resources to focus more on designing and developing products under its own brand name.
Fab to Cut Another 80 to 90 Jobs, a Third of Global Staff
This is the company’s fourth round of layoffs in the last 10 months.
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
The move will eliminate around one-third of Fab’s global staff and leave the company with 200 employees. All of the cuts will occur at the company’s New York headquarters, which is believed to house somewhere between 120 and 150 employees.
Workers were alerted that something was up Wednesday when they received email from the company’s human resources department telling them not to come into the office on Thursday and to await further instructions, according to a report by Buzzfeed.
At its peak, Fab employed as many as 700 people, but the company has suffered three previous rounds of layoffs in the last 10 months. CEO Jason Goldberg has said those cuts were meant to streamline staffing and costs as the business shifted from a labor-intensive flash-sale model, where tons of new products had to be sourced and prepped every day, to a more standard e-commerce shop with predictable inventory needs.
“We have parted ways with incredibly talented individuals for whom we have only great respect and appreciation,” the company said in a statement via spokeswoman Amy Juaristi. “Realigning our team is part of a broader business plan, which we began implementing last fall and which will continue to unfold in weeks ahead. We are seeing great success in our recent private label initiatives and customized furniture launches — and we are aligning our global team to support that direction. We have every confidence in our path ahead.”
Earlier this week, the company introduced its own attractive and exclusive line of sofas, dining tables, bedding and rugs. It also opened up a showroom in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. Goldberg has previously said that investing in the private label business is critical in order to sell products that Fab customers can’t find anywhere else, most notably on Amazon.com.
As it has previously done, Fab said it will host a job fair in June for those being laid off. The company will also provide interviewing training and personalized resume assistance.
Investors have poured more than $300 million into the company, and valued it at $1 billion last summer. But that was before any layoffs or the business model change.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
