One of Net-A-Porter’s main challenges was convincing designers to allow their product to be sold by the online retailer.
Quinn says, at first, designers, including Chloe and Michael Kors, rejected the online site. But by the second season, big names including Tamara Mellon, co-founder of Jimmy Choo, came on board.
“We had difficulty convincing designers we would not cannibalise their business and would be brand guardians,” Quinn says.
“We wanted to work with the brands in building their business, so we were talking their language.”
Right from the start, Net-A-Porter’s founders set out to protect the brand on as many domains as possible.
Quinn says once they decided on the name Net-A-Porter they registered as many variations as possible including Petit-Porter with an eye to eventual expansion and even registering Net-a-Porn to try to protect their brand.
Quinn says, for business today, social media is an essential for branding as it allows brands to get away from doing surveys and focus groups.
“Social media has been a game-changer in every industry,” she says.
Quinn emphasises the important role Net-A-Porter’s staff and investors played; “success has many parents,” she says.
Quinn says Net-A-Porter couldn’t afford to pay its staff the same as others but offered them the chance to “be pioneers” and be part of something new and exciting.
“Every staff member had a voice and every staff member made a valuable contribution,” she says.
“Your staff are your ambassadors; empower them.”
Quoting former US President Harry Truman, Quinn says: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit”.
“So many good concepts go out of business just because they run out of funding,” Quinn says.
Net-A-Porter faced the same issues as many businesses in getting funding to start up. Quinn says it was “quite clear” that the male financiers they approached “never understood the shopping power of women”.
She recalls the financiers saying “women wouldn’t pay £400 for a handbag” while Quinn and Massenet kicked their £400 handbags under the table.
“So we went down the friends and family route,” Quinn says, recalling asking her father for an investment of £100,000.
He refused and today Quinn likes to remind him that if he had invested the money he would have received £4 million on the sale of the business in 2010.
Other family and friends were tapped for money until the four co-founders achieved funding of £850,000, but as the money hadn’t come easily, Quinn says they were very careful with it.
“We were enormously respectful of our investors’ money and we didn’t squander it on high rents or airfares,” she says.
“We paid ourselves £20,000 a year each, so we were earning less than we paid our nannies.”
The website design of Net-A-Porter was important, as right from the start the founders wanted the business to be scalable.
“Beware of digital solutions or platforms that aren’t flexible and scalable,” Quinn says.
“A website never finishes, it needs to evolve all the time.
“Natalie and I were very clear we did not want a transaction site… we needed and we got a clean simple shopping and editorial destination.”
Even before the site launched, Quinn says it had a holding page which gave people the ability to sign up with their email addresses. At this early stage, they began analysing the data and noted a disproportionate amount of Mac users.
“So, from day one, we were Mac compatible. Our customers were never more than three clicks away from an editorial.”
Cara Waters is the editor of SmartCompany. Cara was previously a senior reporter at the Financial Times website FT Adviser in London and has also worked for The Sunday Times.
