Jetblack

Jetblack emerged in 2017 as the first standalone company from Walmart's Store No. 8 technology incubator, an initiative spearheaded by e-commerce entrepreneur Marc Lore following Walmart's acquisition of his company, Jet.com. The venture was co-founded by Jenny Fleiss, who brought significant expertise from her success as a co-founder of Rent the Runway. Fleiss, an alumna of Harvard Business School with a background in strategic planning at Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers, was tapped to lead Jetblack as CEO, applying her experience in disruptive retail models to this new concept.

Positioned as a high-touch concierge service, Jetblack targeted affluent, busy urban families in New York City. The business operated on a membership model, charging a subscription fee of $50 per month, which was later reported as $600 annually. Its core offering was a text-based personal shopping service that promised to source and deliver nearly any product on demand, often with same-day delivery. By combining human personal shoppers with artificial intelligence, Jetblack aimed to provide curated recommendations and a seamless purchasing experience, from everyday essentials to luxury items. This model of "conversational commerce" was designed to offer the ultimate convenience, allowing members to simply text their needs and have them fulfilled without browsing multiple e-commerce sites.

The service functioned by having customers text their requests to the platform. A blend of AI and human experts would then interpret the request, source the items from various retailers including Walmart and high-end stores like Saks, and dispatch a courier for delivery, complete with gift-wrapping if requested. The goal was to learn customer preferences over time to offer increasingly personalized suggestions. Despite its ambitious premise and backing from a retail giant, Jetblack struggled to achieve profitability, reportedly losing significant amounts per member. In February 2020, Walmart announced the shutdown of Jetblack as a standalone entity, ceasing its operations on February 21 of that year. While the consumer-facing service was discontinued, Walmart planned to integrate the underlying conversational commerce technology into its broader operations, absorbing a portion of the Jetblack team to apply the learnings to future customer service initiatives.

Keywords: conversational commerce, personal shopping service, text-based shopping, concierge service, subscription commerce, on-demand delivery, retail technology, luxury services, AI-powered retail, Walmart incubator, Store No. 8, Jenny Fleiss, Marc Lore, e-commerce innovation, member-only service, curated shopping, high-end retail, same-day delivery, mobile commerce, retail experiment