Wish raised about $1.1 billion when it went public in December 2020, then sold its whole business three and a half years later for about $161 million. In between, it ran one of the largest shopping apps in the world. Wish connected more than 100 million monthly users in over 100 countries to some 500,000 merchants, most selling cheap goods that took weeks to arrive. Investors bet the pandemic shopping boom would last.

Cheap Goods, Long Waits

Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang started the company, ContextLogic, in 2010. Its Wish app showed shoppers an endless scroll of low-priced items, from phone cases to garden tools, with deep discounts. The bet was on shoppers that big retailers ignored, people who cared more about price than speed. Wish spent heavily on ads to find them. Revenue grew from $1.1 billion in 2017 to $1.9 billion in 2019. Szulczewski, as founder and CEO, controlled most of the votes.

From Wish to LOGC

Wish priced its IPO at $24 a share in December 2020 and sold 46 million shares on Nasdaq under the ticker WISH. The stock soon fell far below its offer price. In April 2024 ContextLogic sold almost all its assets, including Wish, to an affiliate of Qoo10 for about $161 million in cash. It kept its tax losses, left Nasdaq in 2025, and now trades over the counter as LOGC.

Cover: Wishes, plate three from A Glove, Max Klinger. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for Wishes, from Klinger's dreamlike print series.