» uk-netmarketing: roundup: 04-08-2000

ClickMango past sell by date?
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - August 4, 2000

The business to consumer side of new media is a fickle place to be. One minute you’re the toast of the broadsheets, the next they’re writing your obituary. ClickMango launched on the back of raising their VC money in record time, but, as Richard Longhurst so eloquently put it in a post this week, "Eight days to raise £3m, eight weeks to spend it." By the end of the week, the news that Swedish-based fashion retailer, Dressmart, was to drastically scale back operations added to the gloom.

On the news that ClickMango was liquidating, Tom Moore got to the list first, asking, "ClickMango - unworkable business plan or just before it's time?"

Melanie Beech responded, "ClickMango was hardly ahead of its time - for one thing, Thinknatural got there first, for another their standards of customer service were not good and for another, in a field where depth of information is critical, they barely scratched the surface. These seem to have been a couple of guys who picked up a trend, thought they had enough net experience to run a retail site ... and hoped a daft name would do the rest. ... Having said that, I liked the look and feel of the site, and the email newsletters from Joanna Lumley were quite fun -just not enough to make me shop there twice."

Duncan Clubb added, "Considering the shenanigans they instigated a few months ago with the ThinkNatural domain stuff (UKNMs passim), it's not surprising that eyes were not necessarily fully on the ball. 3 months is an incredibly short time, and it seems that the amount of money they were trying to raise was not that huge. Perhaps the plot is thicker than press releases intimate (big surprise)."

Several threads on the list have questioned the long-term feasibility of an Internet-only consumer retailer. Richard Bailey took up this theme, emailing, "I think with only a small % of people using the Internet on a daily basis (and fewer shopping) would you open a business that sold cosmetics without a real world shop? I think there is a lot of ground in to be made in marketing, sales and trust on the Internet before people will use it for buying such intimate products. Maybe to sell for real on the Internet you need to have a physical base for people to walk in to and handle the products. I am much more likely to buy something I have already used seen or eaten. How is that going to work with cosmetics online? Avon (cosmetics) for example gives away trial ... makeup to start the ball rolling. Just my view and I do like shopping too much."

John Handelaar’s posting highlighted a snippet from the newspapers, where ClickMangos’ founders stated, "1: We're operating under budget 2: We're ahead of our sales targets". He added, "[Pretends to be one of the 2nd-stage funding targets they must have been trying to land] If both of those things are true, I'm *definitely* not giving you any more money. Duh."

Robin Edwards picked up on another newspaper quote, writing, "According to one story I saw yesterday their monthly turnover was 2 grand, versus outgoings of 100 grand. Assuming this is true, what exactly were their sales targets?? Wouldn't a market trader look to bring in more than that?"

Reliving the heady optimism way back in December of last year, Richard Longhurst dug out a piece from The Daily Telegraph entitled, ‘Who wants to be a paper millionaire?’ and highlighted the following quote, "Investors are paying for minds, bodies and souls. Robert Norton and Toby Rowland are co-founders of ClickMango, a company that raised £3 million in eight days on the strength of its plans to sell natural health products and information online, but hasn't yet got a website. ‘Nothing but Toby and myself, nothing but a paper concept,’ says Norton." His parting underlines how much the VC climate has changed, "Atlas Ventures stumped up £3 million on that sort of thinking? Anyone got their number?"

Can Internet-only retailers survive? Thinknatural recently announced a deal with Kingfisher to distribute their goods through Superdrug outlets, seeming to suggest a real-world presence might be the way forward. Only time will tell.

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