Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Stitch Fix (Nasdaq: SFIX) recently went public. Its listing is worth celebrating because it is the the first IPO this year for a tech company that was led by a woman. The stock has had a choppy ride as investors are still trying to determine how to value this latest e-commerce in a box company. Nonetheless, in a market dominated by male CEOs, I personally am thrilled to see good execution and a milestone achievement by this company.

Stitch Fix’s Offerings

San Francisco-based Stitch Fix was founded in 2011 by Harvard student Katrina Lake who wanted to build a fashion retailer that would be able to integrate the human element of personal styling with high-quality clothing and proprietary algorithms. After shipping her first order out of her Cambridge apartment, today Stitch Fix has grown to become a multi-billion dollar business that operates on a subscription-based model.

While the company was founded with a focus on Women’s Apparel, it has extended beyond that category to Petite, Maternity, Men’s and Plus apparel, as well as Shoes and Accessories.

Stitch Fix offers a subscription service that allows consumers to sign up for the company’s style boxes by filling out a Style Profile. The profile tells Stitch Fix’s technology platform and its stylists about the user’s size, style, shape, budget, and lifestyle. This profile is then integrated with style suggestions from its advanced algorithms. Stitch Fix’s stylists next hand pick five items of clothing, shoes, and accessories that will fit the subscriber’s profiles and have them shipped out. Each time a style box is shipped out, the consumer is charged a shipping fee of $20. The user can choose what they like and return the rest of the products through a prepaid envelope. The $20 shipping fee is applied as credit toward anything that is retained from the shipment. Customers wanting to keep the entire box get a 25% discount on the order.