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Montreal-based fashion site Ssense is acquiring Polyvore from Verizon’s Oath, but the site will not live on. Ssense has already shut down the Polyvore site, taking its user data and redirecting traffic from the site’s main URL.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Polyvore was previously owned by Oath, a Verizon subsidiary which also owns TechCrunch. Yahoo acquired the Pinterest-like social commerce site back in 2015 in the midst of Marissa Mayer’s tenure. According to Recode, Yahoo paid as much as $200 million for the fashion site. While things largely kept moving in the same general direction after the Yahoo acquisition, it appears that Ssense sees more value in redirecting the Polyvore community to the Ssense domain rather than continuing to deal with upkeep.
Ssense is a site largely focused on online retail for designer streetwear, though the site also seems to produce quite a bit of original content as well. Though they don’t seem to have a major tech component to their platform, the fast-growing fashion site will obviously benefit from having access to the data of an online community that kept fashion trends at the core of its product.
In a blog post, the Polyvore team noted that as of today, the company’s website will discontinue operations, redirecting to ssense.com and that the Polyvore apps will no longer be supported. Users can request to download their data from the service here, they’ll have until May 15, 2018 to download it or opt out of sharing it with Ssense. Otherwise, Ssense is going to gain access to the account info of Polyvore’s userbase.
This is a pretty rough ending for the fashion site, which joins a host of other Yahoo startup acquisitions that were mismanaged or ultimately just mistakes.