Remember CustomMade? The venture-backed Boston startup seemed to have faded away from public view when Wayfair acqui-hired most of its employees in 2015 to avoid layoffs. But it turns out the company has still been chugging along.
This week, the company relaunched as a custom jewelry website and posted its first blog post in nearly two years, detailing the journey CustomMade has been on, from acqui-hire and failure, to buying the company's assets out of foreclosure.
"We’ve learned a great deal from the humbling failure of CustomMade’s first incarnation."
"We’ve learned a great deal from the humbling failure of CustomMade’s first incarnation," the company said in its post. "We still have a bit of a grand vision for our business. But we keep our sights firmly planted on the simple and challenging task ahead of us each day: deliver an exceptional experience and a stunning piece of jewelry for our next customer."
Up until this point, CustomMade had been focused on providing a marketplace for makers in a number of categories, including jewelry, home decor and clothing (for that reason, we had previously called the startup "Boston's answer to Etsy").
But now, the company said, it will no longer serve as a marketplace for third-party jewelry makers and will instead handle all custom jewelry orders with an in-house team. Other categories for CustomMade's marketplace will remain open.
One jeweler who had been working with CustomMade expressed his disappointment in the comment section of a previous BostInno story: "Makers are being kissed on the cheek as they get kicked out the door."
In an email interview, CEO and co-founder Seth Rosen told me the startup has been quietly working on rebuilding itself. After the company reached the acqui-hire deal with Wayfair in 2015, Rosen said the company went out of business that summer and its assets were foreclosed on by Palo Alto-based venture debt firm Western Technology Investment. Then, that same year, Rosen and his team bought the assets out of foreclosure and started a new company with the "CustomMade" name.
While CustomMade is keeping its third-party marketplace open, Rosen said its jewelry business "is now meaningfully larger and growing much faster than the marketplace ever was." He said the company's revenue in 2017's first quarter grew 200 percent year-over-year, and it's already profitable, with no outside capital raised so far.
The first iteration of CustomMade, which Rosen helped launch in 2009, had raised nearly $26 million from investors, including Accomplice, NextView Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Founder Collective.
Rosen's leadership team consists of Sasha Shusteff, a former vice president of engineering who is now a co-founder of the re-launched company; Ty Wilson in operations; Brandon Wirth in engineering; and Ryan Davis in product. He declined to comment on how many people were working on the in-house jewelry team, and whether they were contractors or employees.
