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One Kings Lane's Chief Product and Merchandising Officers Depart in Shakeup

The departures coincide with the company laying off 25 percent of employees, its second big cut in 18 months.

Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.

One Kings Lane’s chief product and merchandising officers are two of the five executives leaving in a management shuffle that coincided with the company laying off 25 percent of its staff, Re/code has learned. The company’s CEO, Dinesh Lathi, mentioned in an email to staff on Monday that five execs would be departing, but didn’t disclose who they were at the time.

A source says those exiting are Chief Product Officer David Yu; Chief Merchandising Officer Day Kornbluth; creative execs Josh Liberson and Ethan Trask; and Richard Hansen, the company’s VP of planning and analytics.

“Given this leaner organization, and the fantastic job that has been done in cultivating a strong group of leaders at the next level, it became clear to the leadership team that the leadership team itself should get leaner,” Lathi wrote in Monday’s email.

Kornbluth was one of the company’s first employees back in 2009, while Yu joined OKL in 2013 after stints at Gilt Groupe, Manilla and Major League Baseball. Liberson and Trask joined in 2011, when One Kings Lane acquired their publishing design firm, Helicopter. Hansen was hired in 2011, as well, after seven years at eBay. A spokeswoman for One Kings Lane said current employees will replace the five departing executives, but did not say who they are.

The departures coincide with One Kings Lane’s second big job cuts in 18 months. The company attracted more than $200 million in investments when it was a new, fast-growing e-commerce site selling discounted higher-end furniture and decor in limited-time sales known as flash sales. But the company has fallen on hard times over the last two years as growth has stalled amid consumers growing tired of daily deals and email providers such as Google making it harder to get marketing emails into a customer’s main inbox.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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