Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake on Thursday told employees the company will be cutting 20% of its salaried workforce and she will reassume her post as CEO as the fledgling apparel company continues to grapple with low sales, a dwindling customer base and a reduced market cap.
The brand’s current CEO, Elizabeth Spaulding, who joined the company as president in 2020 and took over as CEO in August 2021, will be stepping down effective immediately, Lake said.
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“I will be stepping in as interim CEO and leading the search process for our next CEO,” Lake said Thursday. “Despite the challenging moment we are in right now, the board and I still deeply believe in the Stitch Fix business, mission and vision.”
Shares of the company surged roughly 9% Thursday after the announcements and its market cap hovered around $386 million.
Stitch Fix, which sells curated boxes of clothing on a subscription basis, won big during the Covid pandemic after stuck-at-home consumers, newly flush with cash, took advantage of the service to update their wardrobes. But as shoppers ventured back out into the world, sales dropped and new strategies led by Spaulding failed.
Shortly after taking over as CEO, Spaulding led the rollout of a direct-buy option, called Freestyle, that allowed customers to purchase items directly from the company with the hopes they’d be won over as regular subscribers. But the initiative stalled and in June, the company announced it’d be laying off about 15% of salaried workers, or about 330 people.
The cuts left Stitch Fix with about 1,700 salaried employees, as of June.
Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData and a retail analyst, said in a statement Thursday that the company looks to have “lost its way” and that the issues it’s facing are neither temporary nor immediately solvable.
“This is one of the reasons why the company has announced the termination of around 20% of its salaried positions – an action it hopes will help to stem losses and put the company on a better financial footing,” Saunders said.
Stitch Fix employees learned about the job cuts Thursday morning and were told the brand’s Salt Lake City distribution center, which has been open for just over a year, will also be shuttering. Approximately 150 employees at that center will also be laid off, according to an employee at the facility. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about internal matters.
Staff at the Utah distribution center, which opened three months after Freestyle was launched in December 2021, got the news during their all-hands monthly meeting on Thursday morning, the worker said. Staff were “caught off guard” and surprised to hear about the layoffs because the facility hadn’t been open that long, the employee said.
“They did good in my opinion. We had [an] all hands right before work and [they] gave us a packet with all the info we needed from final dates to severance. They even had a translator for our Spanish speakers,” the worker told CNBC, adding they felt “overwhelmed” by the news.
When Stitch Fix shut down another distribution center in the past, some workers were given the option to relocate to different facilities within the company. It wasn’t an option this time around for workers at the Salt Lake City center, the worker said.
Salaried employees affected by the cuts will receive at least 12 weeks of pay, which increases with tenure, and health care and mental wellness support will continue through April 2023, Lake said.
Lake told staffers she was “truly sorry” for the cuts and thanked them for their “hard work” and “dedication.”
As founder, Lake has a unique perspective on the company and its potential, but she will have to contend with a consumer environment that has significantly shifted over the last year and a looming recession that’ll see shoppers reduce their spending on discretionary items like new clothes.
Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022.
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The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.
Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.
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NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.
Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.
AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.
That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
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In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.
Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.
Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.
The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.
“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.
“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.
Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.
Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.
Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.
The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.
“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.
Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.
“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”