Mac & Mia
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Mac & Mia was a Chicago-based children's clothing styling service founded in 2014 by Marie Tillman, widow of NFL player Pat Tillman. The company connected parents with stylists who handpicked boxes of curated kids' clothing from its inventory and shipped them to customers' doors; parents kept what they wanted and sent the rest back, in the style of Stitch Fix or Trunk Club. The company raised $9 million in venture funding, including a $5 million Series A in April 2018, from investors including Chicago Ventures, KGC Capital, Emerisque Ventures and Corazon Capital.
02 / Mac & Mia FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No public postmortem explained the closure: Mac & Mia announced on its website in July 2019 that the time had come to say goodbye, shutting down after five years despite $9 million raised and a 2018 Chicago Crain's Tech 50 nod.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Mac & Mia 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 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Founded in 2014 in Chicago by Marie Tillman; hired its first employees in early 2015 and raised an angel round that summer.
- 02
Raised $9 million in venture funding, including a $5 million Series A in April 2018 from Chicago Ventures, KGC Capital, Emerisque Ventures and Corazon Capital.
- 03
Named one of Chicago Crain's Tech 50 in 2018.
- 04
Announced via a founder note on its website in July 2019 that the company was shutting down.
- 05
No reliable loss figure disclosed; venture funding raised is not a loss.