don't call me a cougar

Founder and was CEO now Marketing Director of www.moonfruit.com

J: What interests me, first of all, is how you got to do a degree in computer science at Imperial College. What was your background as that was pretty unusual for a girl?

W: I went to a girl’s grammar school and it was in the Thatcher years so we had a belief that you could do anything and women could get out there and get on in the world. We were ball breakers, but that was OK!

J: And what about your family background?

W: My parents were immigrants to the UK, my father from Burma and my mother is Chinese from Malaysia. My maternal grandfather refused to pay for an education for my mother as in those days it wasn’t considered appropriate that a woman should have an education. He did give her the money to go and study to be a midwife in the UK, so she seized the opportunity and came to the UK. She met my father here and he sponsored her through a technical degree and she was one of the very few women at that time to work in IT.

J: So it didn’t seem too abnormal for a woman to go into computer science?

W: Yes exactly. A lot of my female contemporaries might have thought a degree in computer science a bit boring and geeky, but I thought it might be fun, and it was! For a start we were 7 women and 120 men at Imperial College! I enjoyed the degree and met people who I worked with later.

J: What happened next?

W: I left Imperial College and went to work for Arthur Andersen as a tax consultant. It wasn’t a very exciting job, I found it constraining, but having done it, it stood me in good stead later on when I wanted to raise money for my business. I stayed there a year.

J: And what did you do next?

W: I started working for a banking software company doing programming. It was actually great fun and I travelled a lot doing project management all over the world.
I really enjoyed it. After I had been there a while a client, who became a great friend and mentor,  Richard Duvall, who had become IT director for Prudential decided to set up Egg, which was a very original concept at that time. Nobody was doing online banking and he brought me into Egg as head of CRM. That was ’97 and I was the youngest female manager. They were heady times as it was all a completely new concept. Richard was an inspiration and later gave me seed funding when I wanted to start my own venture.

J: So how did you come up with your own idea?

W: At Egg we were doing a lot of work around communities and the idea behind Moonfruit was really enabling people to share their passions online. A place that people could easily create online communities as we enabled them to build websites easily in a very visual way. I set it up with an old friend from Imperial, Eirik, Richard, friends and family gave me seed funding to build the prototype, while still allowing me to work part time at Egg while the company got going. I was very supported. We then joined forces with Joe and Tony who had a web agency Sixzeds. This was 1999 and we raised £500k from Bain Lab which was the incubator for Bain and Co. and we built the launch product. Before launching in 2000 we raised £5m from LVMH which had a tech fund. It was the height of the dot com boom and everyone wanted to invest in the internet.

J: But then there was the dot com crash.

W: Yes things got really tough between end 2000 and 2003. In a way we had got too much money too soon and we had too many staff, which we had to lay off. We were a company based on an advertising revenue model and the income wasn’t enough. The model simply wasn’t working and the tech world was crashing around us. From being a company with 50 employees we went back to 2 people! I was going out with Joe from Sixzeds and I had to lay him off too! We married in 2002 and after he left the company he went to work for McKinsey which turned out to be a very good thing as later on he came back to the company with greater expertise.

J: So what happened to get the company going again?

W: We had to change the model, so we started charging. We were always a community based site so tried to explain to our users why we had to start charging and it was only £4.99 a month. We slowly build it up again relying on freelancers and worked really hard. By 2005 it was profitable but I was feeling the grind so went off to Central St Martin’s to do an MA in textile design.  At that time Richard set up Zopa a peer to peer lending company which I consulted on. It’s been doing very well since nobody trusts the banks anymore.

J: So how did Moonfruit develop?

W: Joe came back to the company in 2004 and together with Eirik my original partner in Moonfruit and Stephan Ramoin who was head of Lycos Europe, set-up Gandi Group, having raised 13m€. Gandi Group bought leading European domain name registrar Gandi.net  and Moonfruit and I became marketing director. It has doubled in value and recently launched a cutting edge virtual hosting service for SME’s while Moonfruit has grown 70% since this time last year.

J: What are your plans for the future?

W: Possibly to sell in 3 – 5 years, if we carry on enjoying growing the business who knows! In the meantime Joe and I have had 2 children and they take up quite a lot of my time. As a woman I don’t think you can have it all, all at once, but you can phase it.

J: And how do you find being married to your business partner?

W: Joe has always been grounded and wise beyond his years, we share responsibilities. He’s 6 years younger than me and I think the fact that we shared many formative life experiences, the company getting funding, going through a very  difficult phase, then building it again and raising our children has created a really strong bond.

J: Lastly, Wendy, is there one thing you would have done differently?

W: Yes I wouldn’t have scaled it so quickly and had a clear business model with income!

By Julia

As a female internet entrepreneur myself, I know we are a relatively rare breed, so I was very impressed with Caroline Beau de Lomenie, French, married, mother of three, living in London who has set up her own site to supply fashionable clothes for dolls.

Here’s my interview with her…

J: Caroline, so how did you get the idea?
C:I was talking to a friend who asked me where to find clothes for her daughter’s Barbie. I looked and there wasn’t anything on the market, online or off. There was very little available and what was out there was bad quality and bad design. The only fashionable clothing available was on the Barbie site, but you couldn’t buy the clothes without the doll, plus they were collectors items priced over $50 not really for little girls to dress their dolls.

J: Had you been thinking about setting up your own business?
C: Yes I’d just had my third child and was looking around for an idea. Various ideas were marinating in my head and when I saw this gap in the market I knew I should develop it.

J: How did you fund it?
C: I had inherited some money which really wasn’t enough to do anything with, like building a new bathroom, but my brother had inherited the same amount and so we put the money together and went into business as a team. It was enough to start something decent. We went to see an accountant and he set up the company very easily.

J: What was your next step?
C: The next step was finding the name. I liked dollita.com but asking around I realised that dollita had too many Lolita connotations and in the UK that is more negative than in France where it just means a sassy young girl. Then we hit on fashionette but the dot com was taken so we registered fashionette.co.uk and fashionette-dollswear.com.

J: What was the next step?
C: We needed to find a designer to do the first samples. We found her through personal contacts and then we had to decide where to get the clothes manufactured. We decided against China, and started looking for somewhere in North Africa. We felt it was nearer to home and we wouldn’t have a language problem. We contacted the chamber of commerce in Morocco who put us in touch with several clothing manufacturers. None of them wanted to do the work for us but several of them suggested we try a manufacturer in Tunisia who specialized in dolls clothes and soft toys. We went to see him and it worked out well. He is an honest man, with good working practices and has a group of women working for him who seem happy.

We took him the fabric, patterns, technical drawings and samples made by the designer to try out to see if he could do what we wanted. I then had to source wholesale fabric so after a holiday in SW France, left the kids with my parents-in-law and went off to Paris.
I tried the Marché St Pierre, which is a well known place for fabric sellers, but it was way too expensive. Then I tried Sentier which is the area for fabric wholesalers and that was far more within my budget.

J: Did you not think you could find fabric in the UK?
C: It was more that with the traditional links between France and North Africa it would be easier to ship the fabric to Tunisia.

J: What was next?
C: We had to find another designer as the original one was too busy with her day job, so I put an ad in the London Fashion School and was inundated with replies. For some reason one email stood out. I always follow my instinct and decided to meet her first. I couldn’t have told by her name but it turned out she was French-Tunisian. She brought her book of designs along and I had no idea how to assess whether she was good or not, but I liked her and she did our first set of full designs and they turned out very well. I returned to the wholesalers in Paris to choose which fabric should be used with which outfit [that took a month!], had it shipped and then went out to Tunisia myself to make sure everything was clear.

J: What about the site, how was that coming along?
C: By the time I went to Tunisia the site was almost finished and I needed photos of the clothes to put on the site and was hoping it would all be done by Christmas, but things always take longer than you think, and the outfits to be photographed are only ready now. We’ve had to redo the packaging and find different printers as I wasn’t happy with the Tunisian samples.

We hope to launch in May. It won’t just be Barbie clothes but all clothes for fashion dolls between 10” and 12” for little girls in the 5 – 9 age group.

J: One last question, aren’t you afraid of encouraging a generation of difficult little fashionistas?
C: Isn’t that what all little girls are anyway?!

By Julia

Check out the site: http://www.fashionette-dollswear.com/