Plan A

Gareth    Planning    

We needed to decide what to sell. We ruled out Books, CD’s, Movies, Consumer Electronics and Food immediately. We had little appetite for competing with the seriously well established on or off line players.

I think there is still scope for a small player to hammer out a market in one of these areas, but they would need to define an accurate niche and have a seriously good product offering. Anything to do with IT hardware / software was also eliminated on day 1, as we knew margins were tiny.

What we needed was an area that had reasonable market size, say over £500m, but was still under-represented online and had growth potential.

We got our hands on a report into the e-commerce market for Europe from 2006 – 2011. This broke the market down by retail sector, giving predicted stats on sales revenue growth and also talked about general barriers to online sales, trends in shopping online and a host of other factors. The bit that caught my eye was in the executive summary:

By 2011, 32 million UK consumers will be shopping online. These consumers will remain the second biggest spenders in Europe: The value of the goods they buy online in 2011 will add up to almost 76 Billion Euros, making the UK the most lucrative eCommerce market in Europe. Most retail categories will see double-digit year-on-year growth, with alcohol and clothing growing fastest.

Whilst it’s great to read a report that supports your view, it was the mention of clothing that stuck. Footwear was also a big performer. From here we decided that anything too fashion led was beyond our expertise and budget to get right.

I ski a fair bit and we all live and work in Dorset, so getting to outdoor sports was no big leap. I also own horses, and remembered that my wife was constantly moaning how riding gear websites were few and far between. So, in a flash of brilliance(!), I decided that our company would sell outdoor sports clothing, footwear and gear. We would launch the site with a complete range of riding clothing, footwear and equipment….

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