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Shareby Alexandra Jacobs
The New Yorker (14 September 2009)
“Owning a large collection of shoes in various styles and colors has, in the past decade, gone from being considered a sign of ultimate imperial excess (Imelda Marcos) to a constitutional right of the average American woman, and Zappos is at least partly responsible. (So is “Sex and the City.”) Hsieh (pronounced “shay”) has changed the business so radically that, in July, Amazon.com, after trying to compete with Zappos by starting a shoe site called Endless.com, as if to sanction the new insatiability, announced plans to buy the company for ten million shares of stock (worth $790 million at press time) plus $40 million in cash. In an S.E.C. filing, Amazon vowed to leave Zappos’s management structure intact.”
