Closing Catwalk Genius

Goodbye sunset by anggha on Flickr (cc)

I’m very sad to report that we’ve decided to pack Catwalk Genius away in mothballs and call it a day.

It’s been a splendid chapter in our lives and we still believe there’s scope for a company to successfully bring fashion designers and  consumers together directly, but after a lot of thought we’ve reluctantly concluded that it won’t be us.

Some of the key lessons we learned are outlined below, but the tl:dr is that the market has matured since we first entered into the fray. Now, our pockets simply aren’t deep enough to catch up on the competitors who’ve realised the potential in enabling style fans to become involved in the fashion creation and buying processes.

We worked with some very talented people and businesses over the lifespan of the venture and we’d like to thank them for all their work and support. Most of all, we’d like to thank the designers and customers who took a chance on Catwalk Genius when we were the tiny, unknown, out-of-towners on the scene. You all rock, so hard.

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For any start-up founders interested in the space, here are the main things you might like to take from our experience.

Writing down the causes of failure is the ultimate exercise in humility and you may rest assured that we are acutely aware of our stupendous idiocy in making these route-one cock-ups. My ego would like to state for its own health that this was our first start-up venture and we’ve comprehensively learned these and a multitude of other valuable lessons over the course of it.

Defence aside, this is the summary of the main things we’d do differently in retrospect:

• We tested our product assumptions, but didn’t apply enough rigour in testing our hypotheses about the market. We have since read Four Steps to the Epiphany 100 times as penance. Founders, don’t do this. It’s a senseless waste. Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad posts at Stanford detail some excellent real-life examples of how to scientifically test your venture to avoid failure, if you need a spot of hand-holding.
• As a result, we over-estimated how much customer traction we could achieve while boot-strapping. Our consumers liked the interactive nature of what we were doing, but this didn’t change the fact that the competition was every clothing retailer around our price points.
• Even if we had an inkling about the previous point, we underestimated the importance and expense of an achingly-beautiful aesthetic in order to sell fashion online. We worked with great providers in this area and IMHO we managed a decent job for our little budget, but to compete in this field requires a pricey ongoing large quantity of the highest quality buying, web & UX design, photography, styling and modelling.
• We should have had a full-time, in-house engineer to make ongoing enhancements to the web product as we learned more about the market needs. We also worked with talented programmers but never took the leap of hiring them full-time. The founders also had no coding skills, so were entirely dependent on outside help. We’re eliminating this basic ignorance now, of course. Our next venture will almost certainly also include a technical co-founder.
• As a result of this, we took far too long to pivot away from crowd-funding after learning about the difficulties in its scale.
• Throughout the venture we lived a few hundred miles away from half of our demographic and the key industry figures. At one point, we lived a whole sea away. And flying that frequently isn’t fun. I’m sure it’s eminently possible to scale a new venture away from one of the world’s start-up capitals, but we’re pretty sure that you can’t grow a fashion start-up away from a global fashion capital.

And that’s the long and short of it from my perspective.

I’m happy to attempt an answer to individual questions from entrepreneurs via email, so leave them in the comments and I’ll get back to you when I can. We have nothing but encouragement for you.

One thing we’re sure of is that despite all of the above, start-up life is very definitely the only way to fly. We’re already working on our next venture, so keep in touch and we’ll let you know what we rustle up.

Thanks again – Helen.