I'm the Series A investor in this company.
We in fact have done plenty of due diligence, and you will be pleased to know it is not a scam company. In fact, the company has very high customer satisfaction ratings, including an NPS that is in the ballpark of Amazon, and a very high customer retention rate. More than half of the people who subscribe to the service are still subscribers after two years, which is unusually high for a subscription service.
I obviously cannot speak to your girlfriend's experience. With nearly a million subscribers, there are certainly people with bad experiences -- same is true with any service. Netflix is great but I am sure there are a number of people who have had a bad experience.
I would encourage the HackerNews community to consider the opposite: if we assume the investors in this business do perform due diligence, is there another possible explanation? Is it possible that this case is not representative of the average case?
But hey, we don't have to be he-said-she-said here, anyone can just go to the site and verify if this claim is true. In essence, the claim is: "The site tricked me. I went to buy a single pair of shoes, and in doing so, they actually started taxing my credit card every month, and no one warned me."
Folks are right to be skeptical -- a lot of businesses have done this, tried to hide the fact there would be future charges. Does JustFab?
I just went to the site -- you can do this -- picked a random pair of boots and put them in my shopping cart. I then clicked checkout, and here is what that page looked like:
http://imagesup.net/?di=15138026329215
"I wonder how much of this $100 million are from people like my girlfriend who simply didn't read their entire 2,500 words Terms of Service and were unaware that they were charged $39.95 a month for nothing" -- Seriously, please look at the link above to the checkout flow and tell me that's how you see it, that you have to read the 2,500 word TOS to figure out that this is the case.
Seems pretty clear to me. You can get the boots for $39 if you join the VIP program. "With this purchase, you will be activating your VIP membership"
Under "How VIP Membership Works", it explains:
" If you do not take action between the 1st and the 5th of the month, you will be charged $39.95 for a member credit on the 6th. Each credit can be redeemed for 1 JustFab item, so use it to shop later!"
It's in plain English, and in the same font size as everything else on the page. Over 800,000 people can manage their subscription account every month without racking up credits. I'm sorry it didn't work for your girlfriend, and I recognize she is not the only one who has not grokked the subscription element and been surprised -- but it's a tiny minority, and the information is quite clear on the site.
Finally, one may ask: why subscription at all? Well, $39 for a high quality pair of boots is a really, really good deal. Most e-commerce merchants have to reacquire their customers for every transaction. By asking members to commit to come back to the site once a month, the company doesn't have to constantly pay google or other traffic sources to acquire members, and to have prices like this you have to keep costs low. That's the deal. There are plenty of higher priced places to buy shoes if you don't want to subscribe.
Double finally: credits never expire. If you have 8 credits in your account, you can go get 8 pairs of shoes.
Justfab is an awesome company and is creating and H&M or Zara experience online: fast fashion at great prices. I'm not sure HN is the target demographic, but it's a great service and customers love it, and VCs have poured money into because of that.