In the beginning…

Gareth    Planning    

Myself, Matthew Collis and Alexandra Pepler, have worked together for about 10 years. Matt and I started a small web design agency and shortly realised that we couldn’t organise our way out of a paper bag, so we hired Alex. Since the heady days of 1997 we’ve been together through good times and bad, meeting clients and making friends along the way. As our business grew, we got involved in other startups and were lucky enough to work with some of the biggest companies in the world.

Our agency continues to do well, and is established enough to give us the time for a new project. We needed a model that wasn’t tied to the number of hours we could work, so in mid 2006, we decided to get directly involved in e-commerce.

This, I suppose, was the birth of Webtogs, although we didn’t have a name back then, and had no idea what we would sell. Alex was running her own web store selling shoes, alongside working with us, and was(still is!) doing incredibly well, she provided the much needed retail expertise that Matt and I lacked.

So, how hard could it be? We’d built front and back end solutions for a host of clients on a host of platforms… Turns out, it’s quite hard, actually, and we haven’t even launched yet!

We weren’t interested in creating a small site. We wanted to build a brand that would grow to the size of the largest players in the world. We knew that whatever we sold, the company would be about customers first and everything else second. We would build a world beating e-commerce platform that we could scale up to cover 1000’s of products over the next few years.

Realistic? we hope so, Risky? definitely, Exciting, without a doubt!

After a fair amount of procrastination and alongside our other commitments, we finally came up with plan A.

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