Sites like these have huge expenses. In addition to having to pay staff ranging from programmers to models, they take on a lot of risk when they buy and warehouse the products. Consumers are fickle. If the site buys the wrong stuff, they are perpetually losing money on it as it takes up space in the warehouse.

The business model for online fashion retail is for the founders to extract as much cash as they can for themselves while it's hot and leave investors holding the bag when it's not.

I would take any article about such a company with grain of salt. One thing these companies do well is PR. Getting media placement often comes easy for them as employees of magazines, newspapers and blogs are often into fashion themselves and are eager to run a story about something they are personally interested in.