BoF: You have attracted a number of impressive investors. How did you go about choosing your investors? Other than financial backing, what have they brought to the table?
BAC: I have been good at finding good investors who bring more than just money to the table and I’m so delighted with the people that we’ve got on board. When things are good, or when things are bad, we’ve had nothing but support from them.
Mark Esiri was our first investor. And when he came on board, he brought some other people with him. Then, my ex-Tesco people invested. [At Tesco] I did a deal with a guy — we bought his online dieting company called e-Diets and he made loads of money. So when I rang him up and said I’m setting up [Astley Clarke], he invested. And Robin and Saul Klein I had done this deal with and they invested. Then Index [Ventures] got in touch, which opened up a whole new family of people. More recently Carmen [Busquets], who came via a lady called Mimma Viglezio, a former communications director at Gucci Group who has been great, helping us with PR, helping us with product.
It’s a really nice bunch, because we have these hardcore e-commerce tech guys who know nothing about products, but they approach it from a conversion rate, traffic, stop doing affiliates, start doing this, all of that good old fashioned e-commerce stuff. And then we have people like Carmen and Mimma, who understand products and who understand brands. I think e-commerce and platforms was the differentiator ten years ago or five years ago. But now anyone can have a website. There’s no barrier to entry. But not everyone can have a brand.
BoF: Looking into the future, where do you see Astley Clarke in five years time?
BAC: We’ve got a slide: it’s a map of the world. We want to be a global luxury jewellery brand. In a similar sort of vein to what Mulberry did for handbags, I think we want to be that sort of size business, a £200 million turnover business with some multi-currency and multi-language websites, with concession locations or wholesale locations across the world, and probably one or two flagships. I mean we have in our business plan a London one, which is a definite, and possibly one on the East Coast of America. But we’re not a store rollout business. We’re an e-commerce business using offline to build our brand.