A Stitch In How Much Time?: Stitch Fix tried to sew up a healthy public stock debut Friday. But, instead, the San Francisco-based provider of online-based personal shopping and clothing found out just what happens when you pull long enough at a loose thread.
Stitch Fix priced 8 million shares of its stock at $15 a piece, and at that point, the company had to know its shares weren’t going to be a good fit for everyone. The company had earlier set a price range of $18 to $20 a share for its IPO, with plans to put 10 million shares up for sale. However, it had to cut the price, and the number of shares it sold, because of concerns about it being able to maintain a semblance of profitability.
Stitch Fix is one of those online subscription-based companies that lets customer sign up for regular deliveries of a product–in Stitch Fix’s case, clothes. People pay for what they want and return the rest. But booming marketing and product costs have had hampered such companies’ earnings prospects, (See: Blue Apron), and resulted in some less-than-stellar public debuts.
Add Stitch Fix to the mix. While its shares hit as high as $18.53 on Friday, that lofty gain wouldn’t last. By the time trading closed, Stitch Fix ended its first day as a public company at $15.15 a share. The initial opinions about Stitch Fix has already been sewn up.
(Not) Home For the Holidays: Apple, already behind Amazon and Google in the market for smart home speakers, won’t be getting its HomePod system into anyone’s home in time for Christmas the year. Apple said the $349 HomePod won’t be on sale until early 2018. An Apple spokesperson said in a statement, “we need a little more time before it’s ready for our customers.”
Sales Go Up, Supply Goes Down: Welcome to the always eventful world of Bay Area real estate, where nothing is ever surprising. The latest report from the California Association of Realtors says the number of active home listings across the nine Bay Area counties in October fell from a year ago, while the median sale price across the region climbed more than 11 percent, to nearly $893,000.
Quote of the Day: “My biggest flaw and strength may be that I see things very differently than normal. I’m not necessarily the best at predicting what would be controversial.” — James Damore, the former Google engineer fired after he posted a long screed critical of the company’s diversity policies. Damore told the Guardian that he “sees things differently” since being found to be on the autism spectrum.
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