# The Controversy at Phia, Phoebe Gates’ Buzzy Startup

An episode of [Big Take](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1578096201), 11 Aug 2026, 20 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/UVBrz8bN8aM2Xe47PEPu/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/825d4e29-b616-46f4-afd7-ae2b0013005c/aa408535-c169-46d7-bb29-b4a3014b56c5/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=8b1dd624-a026-43e9-8b57-ae2b00130066

The online shopping app Phia raised over $43 million and captured media attention for its A-list investors and its high-profile co-founders — Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill Gates, and her college roommate and podcast co-host Sophia Kianni. But Bloomberg reporting suggests that Phia was pushing features that took credit for sales it didn’t drive. On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg technology editor Olivia Solon shares her reporting on Phia and what the startup’s founders may have known about those features. Read more: • Gates Heir’s Shopping App Claimed Sales It Didn’t Drive • Phoebe Gates Knew Phia Shopping App Took Credit for Sales It Didn’t Drive We have a special Bloomberg subscription offer for podcast listeners at Bloomberg.com/podcastoffer. Hosted by Sarah Holder; Produced by Julia Press; Reported by Olivia Solon. Fact-checking by Victor Swezey and Brunella Tipismana Urbano; Engineering by Alex Sugiura and Emma Munger. Senior Producer and Editor: Naomi Shavin; Deputy Executive Producer: Julia Weaver. Executive Producer: Nicole Beemsterboer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:02] Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
[0:08] Speaker 2: When a startup called Fia launched last year, billing itself
[0:11] Speaker 2: as an online shopping assistant, it got a lot of
[0:14] Speaker 2: attention right away.
[0:16] Speaker 1: They had this whole list of their investors that looked
[0:18] Speaker 1: like a sort of festival lineup.
[0:20] Speaker 2: That's Bloomberg Technology editor Olivia so Long.
[0:23] Speaker 1: They raised money from a bunch of celebrities and vcs,
[0:27] Speaker 1: so notable capital Kleina Perkins, Coastla Ventures, but also Sydney Sweeney,
[0:32] Speaker 1: Chloe Kardashian and Haiti Bieber.
[0:36] Speaker 2: The founders were buzzy too.
[0:38] Speaker 1: One of its founders is Phoebe Gates, who's the daughter
[0:41] Speaker 1: of Microsoft co founder Bill Gates. She went to Stanford,
[0:45] Speaker 1: as did Sophia Keanni, who's the co founder. The co
[0:49] Speaker 1: founders are sort of influencers, and they also kind of
[0:51] Speaker 1: do a podcast.
[0:53] Speaker 2: Welcome to the Burnouts, the podcast where we juggle launching
[0:56] Speaker 2: a startup and surviving our twenties in New York City.
[0:59] Speaker 2: An app and a browser extension that promise to help
[1:03] Speaker 2: online shoppers find deals on their favorite products. When shoppers
[1:08] Speaker 2: use Fia to make a purchase, retailers give the company
[1:11] Speaker 2: a cut of the sale. The startup has raised forty
[1:14] Speaker 2: three and a half million dollars, and according to estimates
[1:18] Speaker 2: from app Figures, it's been downloaded over a million times
[1:21] Speaker 2: in the past year. But last month, Olivia reported that
[1:25] Speaker 2: FIA's success wasn't all that it seemed. She found that
[1:29] Speaker 2: it was taking credit for purchases it didn't facilitate, using
[1:33] Speaker 2: a tactic called cookie stuffing.
[1:36] Speaker 1: You're only supposed to get the commission if the shop
[1:38] Speaker 1: it takes they make an intentional click on something you've provided,
[1:42] Speaker 1: and that you had an influence over the sale in
[1:46] Speaker 1: some meaningful way.
[1:47] Speaker 2: When Olivia brought her reporting to FIA, the company said
[1:51] Speaker 2: that a recent update to their codebase had caused the issue,
[1:54] Speaker 2: that they'd been made aware of the problem within the
[1:56] Speaker 2: past twenty four hours, and that they'd already resolved it.
[2:01] Speaker 2: But Olivia kept asking questions, and from her reporting, it
[2:05] Speaker 2: appears there's more to the story. I'm Sarah Holder, and
[2:11] Speaker 2: this is the big take from Bloomberg News today on
[2:15] Speaker 2: the show the cookie stuff in controversy at FIA and
[2:18] Speaker 2: what the latest Bloomberg reporting suggests about how much it's
[2:22] Speaker 2: co founders new and when they may have known it
[2:29] Speaker 2: for all the excitement around FIA. The product it's offering
[2:33] Speaker 2: isn't entirely new, it's just the latest player in a
[2:37] Speaker 2: vast industry known as affiliate marketing, and it's most basic.
[2:41] Speaker 1: This is where retailers give a small commission to publishers
[2:45] Speaker 1: or other people who refer shoppers to their websites, so
[2:50] Speaker 1: that could be an influencer. It could be like a
[2:52] Speaker 1: reviews website. I think a good example would be something
[2:55] Speaker 1: like Wirecutter, which does reviews of products and then recommend
[3:00] Speaker 1: those products to its readers. And when you click on
[3:03] Speaker 1: a link from a Wirecutter review, a special little piece
[3:06] Speaker 1: of code will be in the link, and that will
[3:08] Speaker 1: mean that if you then end up buying the product
[3:11] Speaker 1: on Amazon or Walmart or wherever the product's sold, Amazon
[3:14] Speaker 1: or walmut will pay Wyrecutter a small commission, and it's
[3:17] Speaker 1: usually you know, a couple of percent through to like
[3:19] Speaker 1: fifteen percent, depending on the type of product.
[3:22] Speaker 2: Okay, tell me a little more about how this works.
[3:24] Speaker 2: How a company like fear makes money.
[3:26] Speaker 1: The key thing about affiliate marketing is in order to
[3:28] Speaker 1: get the commission, the shopper has to have taken an
[3:31] Speaker 1: intentional action with your content. So like you click on
[3:35] Speaker 1: the link from Wirecutter. You read the of your Wirecutter,
[3:37] Speaker 1: so you went to go and buy the thing, and
[3:39] Speaker 1: so Fear is doing the same thing. It has its
[3:42] Speaker 1: own little app that has loads of fashion items and stuff,
[3:45] Speaker 1: and so you can click on a link from there
[3:48] Speaker 1: and you end up being referred to the retailer's website.
[3:51] Speaker 1: It also has this thing called a browser extension, which
[3:54] Speaker 1: is a little program you add to your browser. And
[3:56] Speaker 1: so as you're shopping around the internet, when you put
[3:58] Speaker 1: something in your shopping heart, a little Fear pop up
[4:02] Speaker 1: appears and offers you coupon codes and says do you
[4:05] Speaker 1: want to use this discount code? And if you click
[4:08] Speaker 1: on one of those discount codes, Fear is entitled to
[4:11] Speaker 1: a commission. Any brand with a website is a part
[4:14] Speaker 1: of their marketing strategy, and so Fear was part of
[4:17] Speaker 1: a bunch of retailers like Gap, Nordstrom, I think Walmart
[4:22] Speaker 1: a bunch of their programs to receive commissions if they
[4:26] Speaker 1: help drive a sale.
[4:28] Speaker 2: So, Olivia, what did you find when you started looking
[4:31] Speaker 2: into Fea's practices a little more closely?
[4:34] Speaker 1: Because Fear has this browser extension, it's quite easy to
[4:38] Speaker 1: observe how it operates, and you can see what's going
[4:43] Speaker 1: on with the links as you click them, to see
[4:46] Speaker 1: whose affiliate code is appearing in those links, and that's
[4:51] Speaker 1: responsible ultimately for determining the attribution for the sale and
[4:56] Speaker 1: the commission. And when you look at the source code,
[4:59] Speaker 1: which is public and your colleagues analyze that source code,
[5:03] Speaker 1: you can see the different features and how they are
[5:07] Speaker 1: supposed to behave.
[5:08] Speaker 2: Fea was registering genuine clicks that users made using its
[5:12] Speaker 2: online shopping.
[5:13] Speaker 1: Tool, But what Fear was also doing was registering a
[5:17] Speaker 1: click even when nobody had clicked on anything, so neither
[5:20] Speaker 1: clicking on a link from the app or one of
[5:23] Speaker 1: the coupon codes on the pop up, it was just
[5:25] Speaker 1: registering that someone had clicked, which then injects its own
[5:28] Speaker 1: little cookie, and then what that does is allows it
[5:31] Speaker 1: to take credit for the sale and then therefore the commission.
[5:35] Speaker 1: It was mainly happening on a mobile browser. You'd just
[5:38] Speaker 1: click onto a retailer's website and in the background, it
[5:42] Speaker 1: would just secretly open another tab, but in mobile you
[5:45] Speaker 1: don't see the other tab behind it, and that tab
[5:48] Speaker 1: was the thing that was registering.
[5:49] Speaker 2: The click for Fear.
[5:51] Speaker 1: For Fear exactly, even if you'd come to the website
[5:54] Speaker 1: from wycut or any other referra. We ran tests across
[5:58] Speaker 1: fifty or more websites and it was fairly consistently happening.
[6:04] Speaker 2: Another analysis by a competitor of fears Capital one Shopping
[6:08] Speaker 2: came to similar conclusions.
[6:11] Speaker 1: They were able to see that there was something unusual
[6:14] Speaker 1: happening with the fear cookie dropping.
[6:18] Speaker 2: You read about a type of cookie dropping called cookie stuffing.
[6:22] Speaker 2: Can you explain what that term means and how common
[6:25] Speaker 2: the practice is.
[6:27] Speaker 1: So cookies are used in the affiliate marketing process to
[6:31] Speaker 1: determine which referra was the last click before a purchase
[6:36] Speaker 1: was made, and so cookie stuffing is putting a cookie
[6:40] Speaker 1: there when there hasn't been an intentional action from the
[6:44] Speaker 1: shopper to click on a link intentionally, or to click
[6:48] Speaker 1: on a coupon. Sometimes that it's done through weird pop
[6:51] Speaker 1: ups like ads, and they all drop a cookie. Other
[6:54] Speaker 1: times there's no interaction whatsoever. It's just sort of stealthily happening.
[6:58] Speaker 2: And what does it mean about Fea's business. It's claiming
[7:00] Speaker 2: that it's driving some of the shopping that it hasn't been.
[7:03] Speaker 2: It's claiming revenue from these retailers.
[7:06] Speaker 1: Well, when we were first looking at it, we couldn't
[7:09] Speaker 1: determine exactly what the contribution was, but what we could
[7:12] Speaker 1: see was that it was reliably happening on mobile on
[7:16] Speaker 1: almost every website, I think on every website we tested,
[7:20] Speaker 1: these cookies were being dropped, So that meant that, you know,
[7:23] Speaker 1: retailers who would have made the sale anyway. So if
[7:26] Speaker 1: you just had an organic sale, people just visiting your
[7:29] Speaker 1: website and buying stuff, they didn't come from any referral,
[7:32] Speaker 1: those retailers would have to be paying Fear for that
[7:35] Speaker 1: when they shouldn't need they didn't have to. Similarly, all
[7:38] Speaker 1: the other referris, the wirecutters, the social media influencers who
[7:42] Speaker 1: were sending people to those websites were having their own
[7:45] Speaker 1: kind of codes replaced by fears, So it was a
[7:49] Speaker 1: kind of lost to those people as well.
[7:51] Speaker 2: Just to be clear oli what regulations exist here, you
[7:54] Speaker 2: have other players been accused of this in the past.
[7:56] Speaker 1: I think probably the most famous example was a company
[7:59] Speaker 1: called Honey that got bought by PayPal for four billion dollars,
[8:04] Speaker 1: and it was another browser extension supposedly offering discounts at
[8:07] Speaker 1: the checkout, and it was found to be doing cookie stuffing.
[8:11] Speaker 1: So now there's this huge ongoing litigation against Honey, which
[8:17] Speaker 1: PayPal now owns, and PayPal is denying the allegations. So
[8:23] Speaker 1: the practice is a violation of contracts that Fear has
[8:27] Speaker 1: with various commercial partners, including affiliate networks. And affiliate networks
[8:32] Speaker 1: are the companies that sort of look over the entire landscape.
[8:35] Speaker 1: They have the retailers as their partners, and then they
[8:37] Speaker 1: figure out who was the last click and who therefore
[8:41] Speaker 1: gets the commission.
[8:42] Speaker 2: So OLIVI, you do all this reporting, the story comes out.
[8:45] Speaker 2: What was the reaction like from the industry and from users,
[8:49] Speaker 2: because I remember seeing it everywhere on X People were
[8:51] Speaker 2: really talking about this. People were shocked.
[8:55] Speaker 1: Yeah, it got a lot of attention, and I guess
[8:59] Speaker 1: that's probably partly because of who Phoebe Gates is. But
[9:04] Speaker 1: when we went to the company, they downplayed it as
[9:07] Speaker 1: a recent glitch. You know, we went to them, they said, oh,
[9:11] Speaker 1: on the day you came to us, we'd actually already
[9:13] Speaker 1: been notified by someone else, And as soon as we
[9:16] Speaker 1: realized what was going on, we stopped the behavior of
[9:19] Speaker 1: the future and we fixed it in twenty four hours.
[9:22] Speaker 1: At the time of the first article, we couldn't tell
[9:25] Speaker 1: for sure when the feature had been switched on, even
[9:29] Speaker 1: though we could see it was available in the code,
[9:32] Speaker 1: So we kept on looking.
[9:35] Speaker 2: After the break, Olivia keeps on looking, So Olivia, after
[9:48] Speaker 2: publishing your first story, you didn't stop reporting. What were
[9:51] Speaker 2: the open questions that you were trying to answer about
[9:55] Speaker 2: Fear and these practices?
[9:58] Speaker 1: There were three main questions, how long had it been
[9:59] Speaker 1: going on or when did it start? The second question
[10:02] Speaker 1: was did the founders know about this? And then the
[10:05] Speaker 1: third question was sort of how significant was this alleged
[10:09] Speaker 1: activity to Fea's revenue. Was it a big proportion of
[10:13] Speaker 1: revenue or just a small bit?
[10:15] Speaker 2: And you found some internal documents and had conversations with
[10:19] Speaker 2: sources that shed light on some of those questions.
[10:23] Speaker 1: What did you find The main feature we thought was
[10:26] Speaker 1: live since December definitely was live since December and was
[10:29] Speaker 1: switched off on July seventh, which was the day that
[10:31] Speaker 1: we got in touch with the company.
[10:33] Speaker 2: So this was going on for at least seven seven months.
[10:35] Speaker 1: Yeah, there are a couple of other features we identified
[10:38] Speaker 1: doing kind of similar things at slightly different points in
[10:41] Speaker 1: the customer journey. Some of them had been live since
[10:44] Speaker 1: October or November. I believe we were also told by
[10:48] Speaker 1: sources and have seen messages that indicate that both Phoebe
[10:52] Speaker 1: Gates and Sophia Keani, the co founders, were aware of
[10:57] Speaker 1: the features, and in some cases seem to be proposing
[11:01] Speaker 1: new ways of dropping cookies in ways that are non compliant.
[11:05] Speaker 2: Your reporting suggests that there were three different features built
[11:09] Speaker 2: into Fea's plugin that may have allowed the company to
[11:11] Speaker 2: falsely claim credit for sales. Can you just walk me
[11:15] Speaker 2: through these features? Right?
[11:17] Speaker 1: So? The first one was the open the tab in
[11:19] Speaker 1: the background quietly drop a cookie, enable coupon auto drop
[11:23] Speaker 1: was how it was described, and that was the one
[11:25] Speaker 1: that was switched on in December. The second one, we
[11:28] Speaker 1: don't have a name for it, but it was one
[11:30] Speaker 1: where if you know you're on a merchant's website looking
[11:32] Speaker 1: to buy something, fears pop up appears with a bunch
[11:35] Speaker 1: of coupons, and if you click on anywhere on the website,
[11:39] Speaker 1: whether it's to click back onto the merchant's web page
[11:42] Speaker 1: or to try and close the pop up, it would
[11:45] Speaker 1: register that as a click, which again it's not supposed to.
[11:48] Speaker 2: So if you're trying to close the pop up that
[11:51] Speaker 2: registers as a customer trying to use the service.
[11:54] Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, or if you're trying to click back, so
[11:57] Speaker 1: like get out of the way, I can't see anything on
[11:58] Speaker 1: this page on the rest of the page, it would
[12:01] Speaker 1: register that. And then the third one was something called
[12:04] Speaker 1: passive trigger, which would refresh Fear's cookie every two hours
[12:10] Speaker 1: without the user doing anything at all. You know, there
[12:14] Speaker 1: would have to be a some kind of click event
[12:16] Speaker 1: to start off that process, so it could have been
[12:18] Speaker 1: a compliant click in the first place, or it could
[12:21] Speaker 1: have been a non compliant one. But then every couple
[12:23] Speaker 1: of hours it would just refresh the Fear cookie. So
[12:26] Speaker 1: if in the intervening time, someone else's cookie had been
[12:30] Speaker 1: placed because someone landed on the website from another referra,
[12:34] Speaker 1: it would get replaced again with Fears after two hours.
[12:37] Speaker 1: And so there's a lot of different ways they're doing it.
[12:39] Speaker 1: Ultimately they all lead to the same thing in that
[12:41] Speaker 1: the cookie is dropped and that will lead them to
[12:44] Speaker 1: taking the credit. So they're just taking every opportunity to
[12:47] Speaker 1: drop their cookie so that nobody else can take the
[12:49] Speaker 1: credit for that sale.
[12:51] Speaker 2: And what do we know about what Fear's co founders
[12:54] Speaker 2: knew about these features and how they were being used.
[12:57] Speaker 1: From the conversations we've seen online, the messages and interviews
[13:02] Speaker 1: we've done with people who have first hand knowledge of
[13:05] Speaker 1: the company. Both of the co founders seem to be
[13:09] Speaker 1: aware that they were using techniques that they shouldn't be
[13:12] Speaker 1: using according to their commercial partners terms of service.
[13:17] Speaker 2: Can you just read some of these slack messages that
[13:19] Speaker 2: you reviewed that indicate the level of understanding that these
[13:24] Speaker 2: co founders had about what was going on here.
[13:27] Speaker 1: Yeah, So back in December, we've seen messages where Phoebe
[13:31] Speaker 1: Gates is talking to her technical team and she's kind
[13:35] Speaker 1: of concerned because the company's not capturing every single transaction
[13:40] Speaker 1: that's being made through Etsy. They're not making as much
[13:42] Speaker 1: revenue as they'd expected in the week that she's discussing.
[13:45] Speaker 1: And this is late December, and so she says, can
[13:50] Speaker 1: you confirm autopop for cookie Drop is live on all
[13:53] Speaker 1: sites with the coupon? To confirm with monetizing on all
[13:56] Speaker 1: GMV which means gross merchandise value through that, And so
[14:00] Speaker 1: what she's saying there is she wants to make sure
[14:02] Speaker 1: that when the FEA pop up appears on a website
[14:05] Speaker 1: with the various coupons. At that point, a cookie's being dropped,
[14:09] Speaker 1: and so whether or not someone's clicking on the coupons,
[14:12] Speaker 1: they're still dropping the cookie. We went to them for comment,
[14:15] Speaker 1: they added context that there was a problem with this
[14:18] Speaker 1: pop up that meant that they might have been losing
[14:20] Speaker 1: legitimate commissions as well. I think we, you know, at
[14:22] Speaker 1: the beginning, we weren't entirely sure whether this was just
[14:25] Speaker 1: like maybe some developer who was just adding these tools
[14:28] Speaker 1: to make him look like he was or she looking
[14:31] Speaker 1: like they were performing better within the workplace. I think
[14:34] Speaker 1: the messages we've seen show just how hands on Phoebe
[14:38] Speaker 1: and Sophia were with the startup, and that they knew
[14:42] Speaker 1: about all the various techniques being used.
[14:45] Speaker 2: Olivia, you end your story by quoting one of these
[14:47] Speaker 2: Slack messages that the co founder, Sophia Kiani sent to
[14:51] Speaker 2: a colleague who had written to her about one of
[14:53] Speaker 2: the cookie drop functions you exposed. Can you just read
[14:57] Speaker 2: it to us?
[14:57] Speaker 1: So Sophia is responding to an engineer who's just talked
[15:01] Speaker 1: about the passive trigger, which is the tool that drops
[15:04] Speaker 1: the cookie every two hours automatically, and he says it's
[15:07] Speaker 1: working pretty well. So another feature that she was discussing
[15:12] Speaker 1: wasn't really that necessary, And Sophia responds, that makes sense.
[15:17] Speaker 2: Yeah, just whatever.
[15:18] Speaker 1: We can do to keep these cockies dropping will be amazing.
[15:21] Speaker 1: Thank you.
[15:22] Speaker 2: I want to spend a little more time on FIA's response, though,
[15:25] Speaker 2: how did they explain these tactics, the timeline and these
[15:31] Speaker 2: co founders' knowledge of what was going on.
[15:33] Speaker 1: FEA hasn't provided us with a huge amount of clarity
[15:37] Speaker 1: on the timeline. We went to them for comment and
[15:40] Speaker 1: their response was any features causing misattributions were immediately removed
[15:45] Speaker 1: over a month ago on July the seventh. We're reviewing
[15:48] Speaker 1: every transaction we're fully committed to and have already begun
[15:52] Speaker 1: issuing all transaction reversals to brand partners as a result
[15:55] Speaker 1: of any misattribution, and we are hiring a head of
[15:58] Speaker 1: compliance to make sure something like this never happens again.
[16:02] Speaker 1: So they didn't deny the existence of these features, but
[16:05] Speaker 1: they're not really being drawn on any detail into how
[16:08] Speaker 1: long they've been going on for.
[16:10] Speaker 2: So what kind of fallout can you expect from this?
[16:12] Speaker 2: How might retailers respond?
[16:15] Speaker 1: For example, Well, retailers will want to get refunds for
[16:18] Speaker 1: any sales that they would have made it anyway.
[16:22] Speaker 2: Right after the first story. That was something that happened
[16:24] Speaker 2: right for you had to pay back these retailers for
[16:26] Speaker 2: purchases that were made within a certain time period.
[16:29] Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that time period is going to
[16:31] Speaker 1: have to be a little bit longer than they had
[16:34] Speaker 1: previously disclosed, so they'll have to pay more back to
[16:37] Speaker 1: the retailers. I would suspect they may have to pay
[16:41] Speaker 1: money back to other publishers, or at least the retailers
[16:44] Speaker 1: may have to do that. So other influencers, other websites
[16:48] Speaker 1: that have been referring people will feel hard done by.
[16:51] Speaker 1: We've spoken to a couple of them actually who say
[16:53] Speaker 1: that they were not getting as many commissions as they expected,
[16:57] Speaker 1: and some of them have already had in the sort
[16:59] Speaker 1: of last I don't know, a month or two. That's
[17:02] Speaker 1: a time period where the affiliate networks hold on to
[17:04] Speaker 1: the commissions before distributing them out to the publishers. So
[17:08] Speaker 1: of the commissions that are still being held by these
[17:10] Speaker 1: sort of middlemen, those ones are being reallocated, at least
[17:13] Speaker 1: by some of the big networks. They're figuring out who
[17:16] Speaker 1: the rightful Referra was and paying them the commission. But
[17:20] Speaker 1: once the money's gone to Fear, it's then not to
[17:23] Speaker 1: Fear to unpick all of that. The amount of revenue
[17:26] Speaker 1: they seemingly generated from these features is interesting. We have
[17:30] Speaker 1: reporting that indicates that more than half of the revenue
[17:34] Speaker 1: came from these non compliant techniques, and that's according to
[17:38] Speaker 1: a post that we saw relating to their total sales
[17:43] Speaker 1: that were made in June through their retail partners. Since then,
[17:47] Speaker 1: the company has told us that that post was inaccurate
[17:50] Speaker 1: and used a flawed methodology, and so they're saying that
[17:53] Speaker 1: that was an overestimation, But they haven't told us the
[17:56] Speaker 1: exact proportion of their revenue that did not align with
[18:00] Speaker 1: industry standards.
[18:02] Speaker 2: And what's next for FIA here. They disabled these features
[18:06] Speaker 2: in early July, according to their statement. How has their
[18:10] Speaker 2: business been impacted as a result. If this was driving
[18:13] Speaker 2: significant revenue, well.
[18:15] Speaker 1: At the moment, we're still in the sort of fallout
[18:17] Speaker 1: phase where people are figuring out what's going on. So
[18:20] Speaker 1: some of the ad networks have sort of deep platformed
[18:23] Speaker 1: Fear for a while while they work out exactly what
[18:25] Speaker 1: was going on. They may well take them back in,
[18:28] Speaker 1: but for now they're sort of keeping their distance, so
[18:31] Speaker 1: they'll have to build up trust again with retailers, build
[18:35] Speaker 1: up trust with the affiliate, their affiliate networks, try and
[18:38] Speaker 1: differentiate themselves in a way. They have just launched some
[18:43] Speaker 1: kind of digital wardrobe where you can kind of display
[18:47] Speaker 1: your clothes in an app. The company is still launching
[18:50] Speaker 1: new products, it's still innovating, so it's quite difficult to
[18:54] Speaker 1: know what lies ahead for them.
[19:00] Speaker 2: This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
[19:04] Speaker 2: To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access
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