Katrina Lake vs. Jeff Bezos: Surviving Amazon’s Onslaught

So powerful was Stitch Fix’s blue ocean and surging growth, that it rapidly caught the eye of not only countless customers but also Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. To challenge Stitch Fix, Amazon launched Amazon Prime Wardrobe in 2017, a service allowing Prime members to try clothes, shoes, and accessories at home before purchasing.

The competition heated up in 2019 with Amazon’s red ocean imitative move: it introduced “Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe,” a service modeled after Stitch Fix’s, blending artificial intelligence with stylistic expertise to deliver personalized boxes of clothing to customers’ doorsteps.

As the biggest online sales platform in the world, with the advantage of an enormous customer base, a large amount of user data, and powerful AI capabilities, Amazon would appear to be a huge threat to Stitch Fix.

But was it?

The answer is no.

Its competitive benchmarking failed. When you create a blue ocean and scale it, attempts by red ocean competitors often fall short. This was not Bezos’s first setback resulting from a red ocean strategic move.

Think about A9, Amazon’s search engine that was supposed to go beyond Google’s blue ocean. It failed.

Or Endless.com, Amazon’s online shoe store that competed head-on with Zappos, which had created another blue ocean. It never took off, leading Bezos to acquire Zappos instead.

As our case “Katrina Lake vs Jeff Bezos: Surviving Amazon“ highlights, a blue ocean comes with its own barriers to imitation. Even Amazon, with all its resources and tech prowess, couldn’t make a dent in Stitch Fix and discontinued its Personal Shopper service in March 2023.

Explore Further: In-Depth Case Studies on Stitch Fix

Ask yourself these two questions:

• We typically think about AI as a driver for productivity, boosting our efficiency. Yet, how can you, like Katrina Lake, utilize AI to offer a leap in value, not simply to lower costs?
• How could you leverage AI to redefine industry boundaries, and open up a blue ocean of new market space?