When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made a surprise visit to one of his company’s Style clothing stores in Glendale, Calif., this past August, he posed for selfies with workers while holding a pair of shopping bags. It seems he wasn’t impressed. Three months later, Amazon announced that the store, along with its other Style location in Ohio, were closing.

The stores, meant to be a futuristic twist on a traditional department store, opened shortly after Amazon’s first wave of bricks-and-mortar culling last March, which saw the demise of its bookstores and other shops. But from the start, the project struggled to marry technology and style in a way that was compelling for shoppers, people who worked on the technology and in the stores said. The experiment officially came to an end on Thursday, as both Style stores shuttered less than 18 months after the first location opened.