Net-a-porter's recipe for success

Summary : Net-a-porter's founder details the background story behind the success of the UK-based online retailer. Natalie Massenet tells how she created a business whose turnover was £21.3 million in 2006.

The impeccably groomed founder of Net-a-porter.com, Natalie Massenet, has a knack for making hyperbole sound like a reasonable business proposition.

"A global, excitement-driving phenomenon," is how she describes fashion. What can she mean? Well, specifically, the hunger for a particular shortlist of "must-have" designer goods that she observed emerging in the late 90s.

"Chloe became the hottest thing, overnight, and it only had five boutiques," recalls Massenet, from Net-a-porter's sprawling top-floor office in Bayswater, west London.

"But you had to have the Chloe jeans. So, women everywhere in the world were calling the Paris store and throwing credit-card details at them in broken French."

It was this phenomenon that led her to devise an audacious plan to sell designer clothes to women everywhere over the internet.

Launched in 2000, the year that other web ventures, including the designer retailer boo.com, went bust, Net-a-porter is flourishing. In its first year, "a couple of thousand" shoppers bought on the site. Seven years on, it's 100,000 and rising. Turnover last year was £21.3 million ($54.7 million)

Read the full article at New Zealand Herald