At an all-hands meeting at its San Francisco headquarters Wednesday, the CEO of online independent clothing retailer ModCloth, Matthew Kaness, disclosed to his staff that the company had been sold to another online retailer, Jet.com. Walmart announced last August that it had acquired Jet, a fast-growing e-commerce site. Jezebel reported news of the sale, which they write will be formally announced tomorrow, disclosing that current ModCloth employees received offer letters from Walmart yesterday and adding that the deal is said to be closing today.

ModCloth, a darling among customers for its feminist, body-positive credo, was co-founded by Susan Gregg Koger and Eric Koger in 2002. An advocate for equal pay and representation for women, Gregg Koger wrote that she and many of her colleagues would take the day off recently to participate in the International Women's Strike.

"As the founder of a business that sells to and employs women (in fact, 64% of our workforce is female), it has always been important to me that ModCloth supports women, too. That is part of why the “gender pay gap” is a deeply personal issue for me." By contrast, Jezebel points out that Walmart was sued for discrimination based on gender in 2011 in a case that made its way to the Supreme Court before it was sent to back down to a lower court.

Like many other San Francisco-based companies, ModCloth, which employs more than 350 people at its SF, LA, and Pittsburgh offices, was founded in a college dorm room (this one at Carnegie Mellon). Of late, financial difficulties have led to rounds of layoffs employees reportedly refer to as "reapings" for their frequency in a reference to the brutal lottery of the Hunger Games.

"When I think about the quality of people I‘ve met at Jet and their ambitions and how it aligns with ours,” Kaness reportedly says in a recording of the meeting provided to Jezebel. "And when when I think about their parent company Walmart, who has the resources — but also has when you’ve spent time researching it and understanding it, they’ve spent a lot of time working on corporate responsibility and environmental initiatives and opportunities for their employees and their careers. I think there’s a lot of overlap culturally with what they’re about and what we’re about. I think over time this is going to become an incredible marriage.” Here, some in the room were said to have been laughing uncomfortably.

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