When Natalie Massenet was trying to raise money for her Internet start-up, Net-a-Porter, a luxury online fashion boutique, no one was interested. 'People were throwing millions of pounds at almost any web company then. But they heard "women" and "fashion" and "Internet" and said those words didn't go together,' says Ms Massenet.
But Net-a-Porter, founded in 2000, can now claim to be 'the world's first truly global luxury fashion retailer'. It doubles its revenues every year and sales are now at £37m. It has a distribution centre in London and one in New York, and employs almost 300 people. The web store attracts an average of 90 new customers a day from 101 countries (including Fiji and Greenland), who each spend an average of £400.
According to Forrester Research, luxury brands 'won't survive without an online sales channel'. Over 40m Europeans buy clothes online, and this number will continue to increase. Experts predict it will grow to over 70m by 2009.
The website combines content with commerce: it is designed as a magazine, and everything is for sale and delivered worldwide within 48 hours.
Net-a-Porter is expanding very fast. Ms Massenet says: 'Because we have no physical limit to the amount of designers we stock, we can offer a very wide range. But everything we offer has to be trend-setting fashion.' We e-mail information about new products to customers regularly, according to their favourite designers. You couldn't do that in an offline store,' she points out. 'That's the beauty of this business. And customers spend a lot of money in that kind of environment. Seven or eight years ago nobody believed that.'