Quidsi
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Quidsi, Inc., founded in New Jersey in 2005 by Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara as a 'mom-centric retail technology company', was the parent company of Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, Casa.com, BeautyBar.com and Yoyo.com. After an escalating price war with Amazon over diapers, Amazon acquired Quidsi in November 2010 for $545 million ($500M cash plus $45M debt assumption). Quidsi employed over 1,100 people.
02 / Quidsi FAILURE REASONS
Why it shut down
Amazon worked for seven years to make Quidsi profitable and failed: 'We have worked extremely hard for the past seven years to get Quidsi to be profitable, and unfortunately we have not been able to do so.' On March 29, 2017, Amazon announced it was shutting down Quidsi, folding its sites into Amazon.com; about 263 employees at the Jersey City site lost their jobs, while the software team was redirected to AmazonFresh.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Quidsi ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / AFTERMATH
Lessons
- An acquisition that ends a price war isn't a strategy: Amazon bought Quidsi to stop the diaper-price bleeding, but seven years of ownership never produced a profit.
- Standalone economics still matter inside a giant: even inside Amazon, a unit that can't make money gets shut down.