Jet at One Year
By Marc Lore, Founder & CEO
When we launched Jet one year ago today, we didn’t just want to build a business — we wanted to build a new way of doing business. We wanted everything we did to be rooted in our core values of trust, transparency, and fairness. We wanted to treat our customers, partners, and employees with unprecedented openness. We knew it would be hard; we knew shortcuts would present themselves along the way. But our vision of success meant doing things differently, and we were committed to seeing it through.
Just 12 short months later, I am so proud of the steps we’ve taken in service of that vision. Over 4 million people have shopped with us already, building bigger carts and taking full advantage of the dynamic savings opportunities exposed by our platform. Nearly 2,300 quality retailers have joined us as partners since launch, leveraging our rules engine to win more profitable orders while protecting and elevating their brands. And even as we’ve grown from just 300 employees at launch to over 2,000 now across our six locations, we’ve worked to build and maintain a vibrant, inclusive, close-knit culture.
What’s really exciting, though, is how much room we have to grow. We listen to our customers, partners, and employees every day, and we know we still have a long way to go in order to bring our vision of Jet to life. Here’s what we plan to work on in the year ahead.
The new savings experience we rolled out last week was only the first of many changes to come that will empower shoppers to save more money. We want to give people more control over the economics underlying their shopping experience, and we’re working to implement new savings methods such as dynamic shipping configurations, where people can slow shipping down in order to pay less. We’re going to bolster Jet’s core value proposition by continuing to expand our assortment — the more you can cross off your shopping list at once, the more time (and money) Jet will save you. We already have over 12 million products on the site, including the great home and garden selection of Hayneedle.com, which we acquired this year, and we’re looking to add to that number by partnering with more and more premium retailers and brands. We’re planning to roll out our uniquely accessible fresh grocery offering more widely and build on our JetCares program of making basic needs more affordable for everyone.
We’re also going to expand on the set of tools we offer our retail partners to help them increase their sales, manage profitability, and make meaningful connections with new customers. We just released a new reporting feature called Jet Partner Insights that gives retailers a granular look at the competitiveness of their prices and helps them make informed decisions about their assortment. We’ve always believed that sharing more information creates a bigger pie for everyone, and we want to be the most transparent marketplace out there.
Finally, we’re going to continue to invest in our employees. Nothing we’ve accomplished so far would’ve been possible without the incredible people who have poured their hearts and souls into Jet, and nothing we plan to accomplish in the future will be. So even as we grow, we will dedicate ourselves to maintaining the open culture of our early days. Culture isn’t a set of perks; it isn’t something that can be bought. Culture is your relationship to the people around you and collective passion for the idea that brought you together in the first place. And like any other relationship, culture comes down to openness, trust, and treating people the right way. We will continue to give our employees access to data that enables them to make bold decisions. We will continue to share financial metrics and board presentations with everyone at all-hands meetings. We want everyone at Jet to understand their value and to feel valued in turn. Keeping the spirit of our early days alive as we grow will take an extraordinary effort, but it’s the only way to make our vision a reality.
I knew we had something special when we launched Jet, but I couldn’t have imagined how exciting this first year would be. Thank you for being a part of this journey so far. I can’t wait to take the next step together.
