Zappos Competitor Shoes.com Abruptly Shutters All Operations
Sheena Butler-Young
Deputy Editor
Another one bites the dust.
In a seemingly abrupt move, Canadian e-tailer Shoes.com announced Friday its plans to shutter all operations immediately.
The company said it would take all three of its e-commerce properties — Shoes.com, OnlineShoes.com and ShoeME.ca — offline, along with closing the two Shoes.com brick-and-mortar stores in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada.
Shoes.com said its employees were made aware of the decision on Friday morning and were compensated through the end of the month.
The company said that it’s now working with its secured lenders to determine the process to liquidate assets and currently intends to assign some or all of the group companies into bankruptcy.
A limited group of employees will stay on through the next few weeks as the company winds down all operations.
As of today, all three of the company’s websites were down.
Shoes.com — a somewhat fledgling competitor of Zappos — made headlines in November when it announced via Twitter that it had removed all of Ivanka Trump’s merchandise from its site after customers threatened to boycott the e-tailer for carrying Trump-branded product.
Shoes.com had appeared on a now-infamous online list started by Shannon Coulter, a marketing specialist in California. Coulter, the woman behind the #grabyourwallet campaign on Twitter, composed a Google Doc listing several companies — including Marshalls and TJ Maxx — that carried Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump’s clothing and accessories lines and encouraged others to join her in boycotting the retail stores. (Coulter started the boycott following last year’s release of a 2005 video in which Donald Trump made sexually aggressive statements about women.)
After it announced its decision to discontinue carrying Ivanka Trump product, Shoes.com was removed from the list.
In an email statement to Footwear News, the Ivanka Trump brand had responded to the Shoes.com decision.
“While Shoes.com was an inconsequential part of our business, they were not fulfilling their end of the contract and parting was inevitable,” a spokesperson for the company said on Nov. 18.
