Zulily

Launched in early 2010, Zulily pioneered the online discount shopping experience with its flash sale events model, featuring thousands of products on its website and app for a limited time and quantity at a significant discount. These events, creating a sense of urgency to browse, discover, and purchase, along with Zulily’s method of segmenting its audience to provide each customer with a curated and optimized shopping experience, contributed to its rise to a peak market cap of $7 billion in 2014, and later to $666 million in sales in 2023.

Recognizing Hilco Streambank’s unmatched experience with intangible assets, the wind-down officer for Zulily hired Hilco Streambank to manage the sale process for Zulily’s crown jewel – its intangible assets.  Hilco Streambank recognized the value in Zulily’s highly customized instance of Shopify, as well as the data stored in that platform.  We worked closely with the company to preserve this valuable asset, ensuring it would be available for potential buyers looking to quickly relaunch the site.

Hilco Streambank also positioned the offering as an opportunity for potential buyers to connect with an attractive audience – discount shoppers looking for the best deals on women’s and kids’ apparel, footwear, and home goods – of which there were over 2.5 million customers that made a purchase in 2023 and over 6.4 million social media followers.

We structured a sale process which allowed interested parties to step forward with their best offer, recognizing that many sophisticated parties would want to move as quickly as possible to conduct diligence, document a transaction and close, allowing them to reconnect with the customer as quickly as possible.  Hilco Streambank delivered, with 30 days between the launch of the transaction and the sale of the assets to Beyond, Inc., which plans to use the transaction to “supercharge its off-price business.”