Fabric Lands Another Ex-Amazon Exec, This Time as COO

Fabric, a headless commerce startup, has recruited yet another former Amazon executive to its leadership team. Late last week, the five-year-old company announced that it had hired Stacy Saal as the company’s first-ever COO, starting March 1.

Saal, the former COO of Amazon Prime Air, will lead fabric’s global business operations including its finance, legal and product management and design teams.

Most recently, Saal was the COO of digital healthcare company Babylon Health, but she also brings 12 years of experience operating in senior roles at Amazon. Apart from her time leading the e-commerce giant’s drone delivery operations, Saal also helped lead Amazon Fresh and Prime Now.

"Providing customers with a better online shopping experience via headless commerce has been Fabric's vision since day-one, and I know Stacy will be an exceptional resource for helping Fabric scale while staying aligned with customer demand," Fabric CEO Faisal Masud stated in the company’s announcement. "Stacy's decades of retail experience and success operationalizing next-generation capabilities will prepare fabric for its next phase of growth as we address the shortcomings of legacy commerce platforms and deliver top-down value for retailers and brands across the globe."

Saal is the fifth former Amazon executive to join up with the Seattle-based company over the past 12 months. The startup also recruited its SVP of Corporate Marketing, VP of APAC Engineering, CTO and Chief People Officer from the company’s talent pool.

This coalescence of former Amazon talent can in part be explained by location—the two companies are based in the same city—as well as their overlapping presence in the e-commerce industry. But the new hires at Fabric also follow a trend of executives exiting Amazon for new roles, spurring concerns of a brain drain at Amazon—between January 2020 and April 2021 more than 45 top executives left the company, a trend that seems to have persisted.