Bluefly

Bluefly was a pioneering online fashion retailer selling designer clothing, shoes and accessories at discount prices. Founded in 1998 (from a business begun as Pivot in 1991), it survived the dot-com crash, was taken private by Clearlake Capital in 2013, and then abruptly filed for bankruptcy on February 1, 2019, locking employees out of its Garment District offices. The Bluefly name has since reappeared online under different ownership, which is a revival of the brand rather than a continuation of the company described in the summaries.

Company Profile

Bluefly's idea was the outlet store on the internet: end-of-season designer merchandise — brands such as Prada, Tod's and Hickey Freeman appeared on its flash-sale offshoot Belle & Clive — sold to customers far from any designer boutique. It was innovative enough to outlive most of its 1999-era peers by nearly two decades, but never escaped thin margins and cash pressure.

The February 2019 filing therefore surprised the market: the company had reported strong 2018 holiday sales weeks earlier. For the fashion industry the lesson was about the discount-designer model itself — dependent on a steady flow of luxury overstocks and on customer acquisition costs that kept rising as larger platforms entered the same niche.

The range behind the name is discounted designer clothing, shoes and accessories. Its customers are online shoppers looking for luxury brands below full price. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Bluefly in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Bluefly with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Closed as a public company — filed for Chapter 11 in February 2019; the name has since reappeared online under different ownership — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Bluefly could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: closed as a public company.