Sorabel

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

~ the eulogy ~

Sorabel let you try the clothes on at your own front door and pay only for the ones you kept. the courier stood there and waited. that one idea needed a whole world around it, a delivery army willing to stand and wait at the door, and a country that paid cash on the doorstep instead of a card up front. that world was Indonesia, not Turkey, and so Sorabel was never going to be mine to use.

before the nicer name it was called Sale Stock, which tells you exactly what it was aiming at, cheap women's fashion for a phone-first market that mostly did not own a credit card. two people, a married couple, started it in 2014 out of a garage in jakarta. by then online shopping in Indonesia was mostly a matter of trust, and they built the whole thing around removing the risk of it.

the detail that stays with me is one its own CEO said out loud after the end. since 2016 the company had never held more than six months of runway. it was always raising the next round to reach the round after that. a business can run like that for years, for what it is worth, right up until the morning the ground moves.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

for a few years it worked. money came in, a Series B of around twenty-seven million dollars in 2017, and the company poured it into the hard, unglamorous parts, warehouses and its own clothing factory so it never had to wait on a supplier. by 2018 it was among the most-visited fashion sites in Indonesia, behind Zalora and ahead of most, and it renamed itself Sorabel in early 2019 to shake off the cheap-sales image. app installs ran into the millions. the try-at-the-door promise was expensive to keep, returns are a tax you pay for trust, but it was the thing that made people tap buy in a market that did not trust buying online yet.

~ the postmortem ~

then 2020, and a fashion company met the worst possible year. people stop buying clothes when there is nowhere to wear them, and Sorabel's traffic fell off a cliff between March and April. a company that lived round to round now needed a round badly, and it had one in progress, investors partway through writing their checks. the pandemic scared them off and the term sheets evaporated. on the 30th of July 2020 the company filed for liquidation, and the CEO wrote that employment would end for everyone at once. six months of runway had finally met a year that took a lot longer than six months to end.

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