Clickmango.com

» see clickmango.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Clickmango sold vitamins to British households for about six months in 2000. Two things put it out of reach for me: it shipped only inside the UK and France, and in 2000 I was a teenager in Turkey who had never bought anything online in his life. British dot-com history barely registered here at all. Boo.com made the international press because the numbers were enormous. Clickmango is remembered, where it is remembered, for how fast the whole thing went up and came down again.

Robert Norton and Toby Rowland founded it in June 1999. Norton had run ecommerce at AOL UK and Rowland had done data mining at Disney, and both of them were thirty years old. The plan was an online health and beauty shop with editorial wrapped around it, aimed at people who would rather ask a website about supplements than ask a pharmacist to their face.

The money took eight days. Atlas Venture and a Rothschild vehicle came in during the autumn of 1999, and the contemporary accounts differ on the total between three million pounds and six. Either number was a great deal of money for a business that had not yet sold anything to anybody, and the speed is the part that everyone who was there still leads with.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

In December 1999 the company hired a feng shui consultant and bought an inflatable boardroom, pink and green, for an undisclosed sum. This is not a joke somebody made up afterwards. It is in the trade press as a thing a funded company did with investor money in the month before its website went live.

In January 2000 Joanna Lumley fronted the UK and French launch and the company hired around eighty people out of places like Oracle and Disney. Weekly sales at that point were about two thousand pounds. They were growing twenty percent a week, which sounds excellent right up until you set it beside a hundred thousand pounds a month of running costs and work out when the two lines would ever meet.

~ the postmortem ~

By April 2000 there was a million pounds left and the founders went out looking for ten more. The existing investors declined to lead it, which in April 2000 was less a judgment on Clickmango than on the month. The French operation closed in May. In June the company asked Atlas Venture for a bridging loan of three hundred thousand pounds and was refused in July.

On 31 July 2000 Norton and Rowland announced they were winding the business up, and the detail worth keeping is that they did it while there was still enough in the account to pay every creditor in full. Customer orders were honored through to the end of August. Almost nobody else in that cohort managed to leave the table without owing somebody money.

~ what it became ~

Toby Rowland went on to help found King in 2003, the Stockholm games company that eventually made Candy Crush Saga and sold to Activision Blizzard for close to six billion dollars. Clickmango is a footnote about eight days of fundraising in 1999. The person who did it went on to a company worth a thousand times what he wound up.

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