Ready2shop.com

» see ready2shop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Most dot-com founders were well known before the crash and forgotten afterward. These two went the other way. Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine put a British fashion company on the web in november 1999, watched it burn through roughly ten million pounds of other people's money, and then became household names on television doing the thing the website had failed to sell.

Ready2shop.com was fashion advice as a business. The two of them had been writing a style column in the Daily Telegraph since 1996 and had already done some work on Granada Television, so the proposition was reasonable on paper: take a readership that trusted your judgment about clothes and move it somewhere you could put a transaction next to the recommendation. Woodall took the chief executive role. J.H. Whitney & Co. and Atlas Venture put in the money, which in 1999 was the easiest part of the exercise.

It lasted about a year of real trading. Major staff cuts came in november 2000, the funding was gone shortly after that, and the company was formally dissolved at the end of july 2001 with debts reported around ten million pounds. Boo.com had collapsed the previous may selling clothes to the same market with a similar amount of confidence, so by the time Ready2shop stopped nobody in London was surprised by another one.

In 2000 I was sixteen, on a dial-up connection in Turkey, and buying anything over the web was not a thing anybody I knew did. Card payment online barely existed here and would not become ordinary for years. British fashion television personalities were not a category that reached Turkish screens either, so this company is doubly outside my range: wrong country for the commerce, wrong country for the fame that came after it. What I recognize is the shape of the year it died in, because 2001 was when the whole thing stopped being exciting everywhere at once.

~ the record ~

~ the burn rate ~

Ten million pounds in about twenty months is not an unusual number for 1999. It is what a well-connected London startup with two recognizable founders could raise and spend in that window without anyone stopping to ask difficult questions. The spending went where everyone's went: staff and technology, then the marketing required to convince people that a website was somewhere you went to buy clothes.

The trouble is that the underlying business needed a customer base which did not exist yet. UK online retail in 2000 was a small fraction of what it became five years later. A business selling styling advice attached to purchases is asking someone to trust a screen twice over, once about taste and once about their card details, at a moment when most people were doing neither.

~ the shape of the failure ~

Something worth noticing here is that the product was right and the delivery was early. Personal styling advice as content, with the clothes purchasable from inside the advice, is roughly what a large share of fashion e-commerce looks like now. It just took broadband and a payments layer nobody thinks about, arriving alongside a generation who grew up ordering things.

Being right in 1999 and out of money in 2001 counts as being wrong. The venture money that arrived so easily also came with a clock on it, and the clock ran on a bubble timetable rather than on how long British consumers would take to change their habits. There was no version of this company that survived to see its own thesis proved.

~ what replaced them ~

The founders did fine. What Not to Wear went on the BBC and made both of them famous across the UK and well beyond it, running for years and exporting as a format. Woodall later built Trinny London into a cosmetics business considerably larger than the one that failed.

The joke inside all of that is that the second version worked because it dropped the web entirely and used television, which was the cheaper and better-understood channel for exactly the same product. Ready2shop had the same two women giving much the same advice to an audience that overlapped heavily. It was simply pointed at a screen not yet ready to receive it.

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