Woot Founder Launches OutletStores
“The reason your outlet trip felt like a waste of gas is that you were subsidizing a REIT”
Dallas, TX — October 1, 2026 — Stores.com today launched OutletStores, a network of brand-name online outlet stores, with a rhetorical shot across the bow of the brick-and-mortar outlet mall industry.
“Outlet malls lease parking first and sell closeouts a distant second, if at all,” said co-founder Matt Rutledge, who built the internet’s first daily deal site in 2004 and sold it to Amazon in 2010. “That’s why most of the stuff at an outlet mall was specifically made to be sold, cheap, in that store. We’re restoring the grand bargain between brands and customers. If you’re willing to hunt for treasure, you get some genuinely great deals on actual closeouts, the exact same products the brand sold for full price.”
OutletStores’ inaugural members are BRAND, BRAND, and BRAND, with advanced discussions underway with at least NUMBER other manufacturers.
Overstock lots, not parking lots
Rutledge founded Stores.com with the creative and technical leads who built Woot alongside him. The company’s position is that the discount business and the real estate business have diametrically opposed interests. “Our customers are our shoppers,” Rutledge says. “An outlet mall’s customers are their tenants.”
The outlet store experience has never been replicated online because ecommerce conventional wisdom is to maximize the discoverability of your product feed through syndication, search engines, and social media. It collapses the space between the bargain hunter and the full-price shopper that out-of-the-way outlet malls rely on.
OutletStores does not allow its prices to be indexed, syndicated, scraped, fed to shopping agents, or blasted out by browser extensions. “Brands can solve their inventory problems without creating new pricing problems in the market, or cannibalizing their full-price sales,” Rutledge says.
Flash sales, timed drops, and Woot-style releases introduce the same friction as a 90-minute drive to a remote outlet mall. Conveniently, this is the company’s native art form. Woot-Offs, Daily Deals, and a Bag of Crap that three million people once fought over were the same mechanic: scarcity, timing, and a crowd that shows up to see what’s there.
Running a brand’s outlet doesn’t require owning its inventory — brands can supply it by dropship and keep title, control, and upside. But when a brand would rather be done with it, Stores.com writes a check and takes the goods off the books: cash now instead of clearance later, no fulfillment, no returns desk, no markdown risk. That’s the accelerant, not the business model, and it’s the company’s twenty-two-year specialty — the reason selection reaches the network from brands that were never going to build this themselves.
It’s not the discount. It’s the brands you meet along the way.
Those customers don’t stay put. Stores.com hands the purchaser back to the brand — identity, order, and whether they’re new to that brand — which sounds like a giveaway until you notice it’s the one thing the old outlet mall always did right and every online attempt at this decided to keep for itself.
“Nobody drove ninety minutes to save eleven dollars on a jacket. They came home with a brand they’d never tried. That introduction was always the product. The discount is just the delivery mechanism.”
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