The historic downtown commercial district of Montclair, N.J., is known for its restaurants, antique shops, and art-house movie theater. It’s not usually home to lavishly funded attacks on the entrenched giants of global e-commerce. Yet on the second floor of a three-story red-brick building on Bloomfield Avenue, across a parking lot from a fancy pizza joint and up an unmarked stairwell, are the offices of one of the biggest bets in the history of online retail: a 100-employee startup called Jet.com.
Jet is the brainchild of Marc Lore, the founder and former chief executive officer of Quidsi, a company best known for its most popular website, Diapers.com. He spent years competing with Amazon.com before getting clobbered in a price war and then, in 2010, selling out to the company for $550 million. Lore stayed on at Amazon for more than two years; now he’s preparing to assault it.
