Lesara

» see lesara.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Lesara was a clothing shop on the internet, founded in Berlin in 2013 by Roman Kirsch with two co-founders, Matthias Wilrich and Robin Müller. Its head office was the Schicklerhaus in Berlin and its second office was in Guangzhou, which tells you where the clothes came from. Kirsch was the face of it, and for a few years the German business press wrote about him the way business press writes about people who are about to fail spectacularly.

The pitch was a phrase: agile retail. Lesara claimed to read what was about to be fashionable out of search traffic and social posts and blog copy, feed that straight into a short production cycle in China, and have the item on sale before the trend had properly arrived. No middlemen, no buying season, no warehouse full of last quarter's guesses. Investors liked it enough to put in roughly a hundred million euros over five years, Northzone and Mangrove and Vorwerk Ventures among them.

July 2018 brought another thirty million. In August the company opened its own logistics center in Erfurt, a facility that cost about forty million euros. On 9 November 2018, three months after that ribbon was cut, Kirsch filed for insolvency in self-administration at the Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, for Lesara AG and for the logistics subsidiary at the same time. The immediate trigger was that the existing investors declined a ten-million-euro bridge.

~ the case file ~

~ agile retail ~

I build computer vision for a living, so the claim underneath Lesara is one I can read without any help from the fashion side. Predicting demand from open web signals is a real problem and a hard one, and the part that always breaks is not the model. It is that acting on the prediction means committing cash to physical inventory weeks in advance, and the feedback loop that would tell you whether the model was any good arrives after the money is already spent.

There were also signs the numbers were not what they looked like from outside. In early 2018 Manager Magazin reported that Lesara had been inflating its revenue figures by not subtracting returns, which in clothing e-commerce is not a rounding error. Switzerland's Beobachter had already raised questions in September 2016 about struck-through comparison prices on the site.

~ the warehouse in erfurt ~

Forty million euros of logistics center, opened in August 2018 and in insolvency by November, is the single fact that explains the whole ending. A company burning cash to grow had put a very large, very immovable bet on continuing to grow. When the growth financing stopped, the building did not stop costing money.

It was also the one asset anybody wanted. Lesara Logistics SE kept operating through the insolvency with around eighty staff and had several interested buyers, while the shop that had justified building it was being wound down in the same paperwork.

~ the friday ~

The administrators had until the end of January 2019 to produce an investor or liquidate. They produced one. The contract was finalized and then, immediately before signature, the buyer withdrew, and the announcement went out on Friday 1 February 2019.

About fifty employees stayed on to sell the remaining stock over the following months. Twenty more were let go that day, and the rest of the AG staff had already received their notices the week before, while the deal still looked like it would close. lesara.de sits behind a challenge page today and lesara.com forwards to a domain broker.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »