Zazzle, the online shop that lets you order custom-decorated clothing, mugs, and a variety of other items, has laid off nearly 40% 25% of its corporate staff and 15% of the overall company, which includes workers in its manufacturing factory. The corporate office was hit hard, with over 30 28 of 110 employees cut, primarily in business development, marketing, and engineering. Cuts were also made in the company’s factories, which houses 140 workers (some of which are working under contract).
In an official blog post, the company’s founders write that the site has seen strong growth over the past year, but that the sluggish economy forced them to make cuts in order to ensure the company’s continued profitability. The company says it will continue to sell products currently available on the site, but has cut some projects that have yet to appear and will continue to drop products that aren’t performing well.
Update: Chief Product Officer Jeff Beaver says that the Zazzle representative I spoke to earlier was misinformed, and that 28 out of 110 corporate employees were laid off, representing around 25% of the corporate office. He confirmed that 15% of the staff overall had been laid off.
The news has been added to the Layoff tracker.
Would I trust a company that’s laying off half its staff and cutting everything for producing my items? Not really.
Would I invest in a company that takes these measures? Probably.
Comments on TechCrunch really don’t contribute anything. It’s actually pretty sickening.
I think Zazzle does a great job on products and I’m happy that they’re doing what they can to stay afloat. I just hope the people they let go can move on quickly. Zazzle is pricey but for on demand single shirt prints, I like their products.
“Comments on TechCrunch really don’t contribute anything. It’s actually pretty sickening.”
Your comment seems a tad hypocritical, or are trying to prove your point by way of example?
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Interesting post, a similar announcement has been made by spreadshirt this week. The local newspaper “Leipziger Volkszeitung” estimates that they are laying of about 20 % of their staff. Really sad as the concept of serving niches, as small as they may be, fits the web so well.
Zazzle is horribly unfocused. That’s why they fail while Cafe Press succeeds.
Watching these two, one succeed through lean, competent operations and one failing due to a lack for focus and general hubris, is like a HBS case study in slow-mo (unfortunately, with livelihoods at stake).
This is what happens when your Dad raises your startup funds then becomes CEO of your company in an industry where he has no experience and you hire bozos from Hollywood to run your biz dev.
Have you looked at the traffic comparison charts for the last 6 months on alexa.com for these two companies? It’s pretty obvious CP is dying and Zazzle is growing.
Huh? Zazzle has grown hugely in the past year, while CP has declined…and is now only slightly bigger than Zazzle.
Crazy.
As a Recruiter I’ve placed 3 candidates there (2 Engineers and a Product manager), and know a lot of their management really well.
Seems as more of a precautionary measure to me.
It was well over 30 if not 40, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
good work
Zazzle seems to have made these cuts to stay lean and competitive – something a lot of businesses are having to do right now. Personally, as a gallery owner at Zazzle, I couldn’t be more pleased with my sales figures. I thought this economy would be putting a damper on my sales. On the contrary, business for me at Zazzle has been much much better than I even anticipated.
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As a former employee of Zazzle, I know for a fact that they traditionally cut a ton of jobs in the manufacturing in January. Right after Christmas, business would be so dead that they would cut entire shifts.
Another thing wrong with them was biting off more than they could chew. The entire mantra was that they wanted to have as many products as CafePress had, so they lost a ton of money product testing and spending millions of dollars on equipment that didn’t work, not to mention sending out substandard crap.
The corporate side was even more botched, they resided in their own building and they thought they were Google. There were so many chains of command with their heads up their a$$. I may be biased because there was a clear shelf between the overpaid engineers and the blood and sweat of the company.
When I heard about them taking over a company that customizes shoes (I think it was an offshoot of Reebok), it was one of the stupidest ideas I ever heard.
Without their franchising, which started with companies like Disney and has gradually gone downhill (Jason Mraz?), they would be nothing.
Zazzle is one of the few US companies with a manufacturing base in the US.
Its good for the US – bad for Zazzle !
Zazzle had done a great Job developing the user generated product category – which needs to go beyond printing technology. 2D printing seem to have hit saturation point in the US. I can see Zazzle moving into more complex products. I am sure they will succeed in this.
I believe that the future is in more complex products, more exciting products with better margins.
Another stupid startup bites the dust. This startup received $46 M funding? Wow …. must be funded by some stupid VCs who had to much money to burn.
Try googleing the words “job cuts”. If you think that a company cutting 28 people causes it to “bite the dust”, you are in for a big shock. Half the companies in the US seem to have cut jobs and many of them have cut in the thousands.
I’m sure that it is worse for a small company to cut jobs than a big one. However, as “B Haughey” so eloquently (although unintentionally) demonstrated in his bitter comment, every company has at least some know-it-all dead weight.
Hahaha! I love Zazzle, it pays my rent.
same ones who invested in google and amazon.com, apparently. so, yes.
Good Call Web Bubble:
http://www.busi..._5428_tc057.htm
“John Doerr, general partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is one of the most successful VCs practicing today. His $12.5 million bet on Google (GOOG ) in 1999 has since ballooned into a $3.4 billion fortune, returning 344 times the investment. And that’s only his most recent blockbuster. His track record includes such names as Amazon (AMZN ), Netscape Communications, Intuit (INTU ), Palm (PALM ), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW ).”
Zazzle sends out REALLY BAD stuff. I ordered a shirt that was completely unreadable–the registration was way off and should have been caught by “QA”.
I ordered 5 mugs. Two were perfect, 3 were crap–faded, splotchy, fuzzy as hell. They OVERNIGHTED me replacements that were JUST AS BAD.
They also accidentally copied me in on an internal email that was a weird garbled request that the mugs be re-printed “with focus on quality”….yeah, if they need to say that…
No wonder they’re having trouble.
I wonder if this explains why I never got my check for November to the tune of $2K
(they are issued 45 days after sales month) I should have received it this month and after over a week of trying to get a response form the accounting dept still no check. Not Happy.
They also accidentally copied me in on an internal email that was a weird garbled request that the mugs be re-printed “with focus on quality”….yeah, if they need to say that…
No wonder they’re having trouble.
it pays my rent. wooooooow
It’s because they are a bigger company than those. It’s the same way you don’t hear about small companies laying people off on CNN but you hear about the car manufacturers.
Also, Zazzle is a tech startup, not simply a small company. They pioneered a printing technology and built software and a web community from the ground up. Seems like TechCrunch’s domain to me.