TheIdleMan.com is pure-play etailer dedicated to young men’s fashion. The UK menswear market is forecast to grow by 27% between 2013 and 2018 to reach £16.4bn, TheIdleMan aims to become the global online destination for young men who want to look good without the hassle of hitting the high street. Sales from September to January this year have increased on average 70% month on month, shipping a total of 7791 items in the same period.
Founder
The business is the brainchild of CEO and founder Oliver Tezcan. During his time in charge of men’s brands at Asos.com, the menswear dept was consistently growing faster than the womenswear area. We realised that young men’s attitudes to the way they looked were changing: when it came to style they were becoming less brand-loyal and more interested in getting the right look at the right price.
Products
We created The Idle Man because we believe businesses like Asos, Topshop/Topman, River Island etc are primarily womenswear businesses. From our experience menswear is usually hidden in the basement in a tiny area, or on a secondary tab on the website. Our aim is to shine the spotlight on menswear for young (18-34 year old) men, who want guidance and inspiration to help them look great.
We aim to achieve this in two ways:
1. Curated edit: we scour the globe for the most relevant brands which appeal to our age group from global mega-brands like Levi’s and Rayban, to small and up and coming designers like Hype and Nicce. We have also launched a selected range of key wardrobe staples under our own The Idle Man label, and aim to grow this offer over future seasons. Our aim is not to offer choice for choice’s sake, but to enable our customer to make the right choice for them.
2. Content: we have a full-time editor who writes our blog (The Idle Manual) – this is full of relevant content from the worlds of fashion, food and music, and is also packed full of practical style articles like How to Wear a Denim Jacket, and How to Buy Your First Suit. We also offer a style advice service, and “Wear With” and “Related Items” up-sell section on product pages to guide customers throught the shopping and outfit building process.
Business Model
We are a traditional ecommerce model: we buy stock and hold it in a 3rd party warehouse in the UK. In the short-medium term, our main revenue stream will be the retail of this stock. Fashion is a high-margin (we aime for a 50-75% intake margin) product area so the potential for profit is sizeable. We will also be gradually introducing a drop-shipping/affiliate model for non-core categories such as watches – this will operate on lower margins, but has the benefit of being minimal risk and cash generative.
We believe one of the most exciting features of The Idle Man is the lower returns rate of menswear. From Oliver’s time at Asos, his experience was that menswear returns rates fluctuated between 16-18%, whereas womenswear was 30-35%. This is obviously critical to the overall profitability of the business model. The Idle Man’s return rate between September and the end of year was 15.7%.
Progress To Date
Jan 2014: company founded with a £350k seed round led by institutional investor Foresight Group, as well as money from the founder, non-execs, and a select group of angels.
May 2014: Website launches in beta.
Aug 2014: Follow-on funding round of £725k, again led by Foresight, non-execs and angels.
Sept 2014: Website hard-launches and marketing drive begins. First Month sales of £21,335
Dec 2015: Sales reach £105,121 for December alone. 7,000 active customers, 30,000 email database, 15,000 Facebook fans, 15,000 Twitter followers, 6000 Instagram followers.
Use of Funds
To grow the revenue of an ecommerce business requires buying sufficient stock to achieve those sales, and then marketing spend to drive traffic. These two things costs for the vast majority of the funds we require – effectively working capital.
Otherwise our business is designed to be very lean – we have a full-time team of 6 people, aided by 8 interns/part-time staff at our shared office in Shoreditch in London. Functions such as logistics and photography are outsourced to trusted third parties.
All capital expenditure and operational costs are shown in the financial projections.
Market Analysis
The UK menswear market grew by 18% between 2008 and 2013 to reach £12.9bn (Mintel Menswear UK 2014 Report), and now only spend 10% less than women on fashion (Westfield How We Shop Now survey). And it seems that menswear is further moving out from the shadow of womenswear as the men’s clothing market has outperformed women’s clothing in the past year, growing by almost 5% (4.8%) between 2012 and 2013, compared with 4.6% for womenswear. However, we believe the online space has so far been dominated by women’s retailers doing menswear as an afterthought, or traditional bricks and mortar retailers going online as an additional revenue stream. TheIdleMan’s aim is to become the global online destination for young men who want to look good without the hassle of hitting the high street.
In our experience the way men are shopping for fashion is changing – there is now less focus on brand logos, and more on getting the right look and fit. The Idle Man focuses on this complete look through it’s curated edit of product, and content designed to help men make the right choices.
Competition
There already exist some successful online pure-play menswear retailers such as Mr Porter and Menlook, but we feel these offer luxury branded goods aimed at an older demographic with high disposable incomes. We aim to have very little product cross-over. To the best of our knowledge The Idle Man is the first pure-play in the young fashion space dedicated to menswear. Competition comes in 2 forms:
1. Womens online retailers with Mens sections such as Asos.com, Boohoo.com, and Zalando.com. Our advantage here is that our edit is curated and focused on a young age profile. The Idle Man will carry a maximum of 3,500 skus across 100 brands (compared to Asos which we believe has approx 20,000 skus across 350 men’s brands). We believe the approach of these competitors is based on women’s shopping habits – browse lots of items, buy multiple products, try them on at home and return a large percentage of them. Oliver’s experience at Asos was that men shop via the filter menus on a website ie. trying to get to what they want quickly, whereas women shop through the product pages ie. browse until they happen across something. The Idle Man’s UX and functionality is built round this premise.
2. Traditional “bricks & mortar” retailers which have lauched a website, for example Topman and Urban Outfitters. Our advantage here is that as a pure-play etailer our platform should have better functionality and customer service as it’s our sole focus, and that from our experience these competitors tend to have smaller porduct offerings online as they are held back by space constraints in their physical stores.
Oliver Tezcan, CEO & Founder
Oliver has worked in men’s fashion buying for over a decade. In 2006 Oliver launched menswear on Asos.com – currently the number one fashion apparel website in the UK for 16-34 year olds. Since then Asos menswear has grown into a £200m business with Asos’ men’s sales showing consistent growth year-on-year 10-20% faster than womenswear.
Simon Guild, Chairman
Formerly CEO of MTV Europe, since 2007 Simon has worked with several high growth e-commence businesses including WAYN.com and Spreadshirt.com where he is also Chairman.
Alex Outlaw, CMO
Marketing and traffic are vital to an ecommerce business, and Alex brings experience in these fields from his time as Digital Marketing Manager at Bauer Media’s Lifestyle division covering men’s titles such as FHM and Zoo. He was latterly Marketing Director at luxury womenswear ecommerce business Motilo.
Amanda Minshull-Beech, FD
Amanda was the former European Controller and Finance Director of Amazon Europe, so has priceless hands-on experience of scaling one of the most successful ecommerce businesses of all time.
Thom Scherdel, Buyer
Thom started his career at Selfridges, before moving to Topman as Assistant Buyer in charge of 3rd party brands.
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Trade Sale
We believe a trade sale to an existing retail business is the most likely outcome. From our experience the biggest barrier to entry is the high degree of difficulty of convincing brands to supply new online retailers. We believe our founder’s relationships have allowed us to become an established branded retailer in a very short space of time – which should make the business especially attractive to retailers who cannot access big brands.
20% off full-price items on the site for Crowdcube investors until 31st Dec 2015.
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