DANNY: OK, next to come
up is Natalie Massenet,
founder of Net-a-Porter.
I'll let you take it from here.
NATALIE MASSENET:
Thank you, Danny.
Good morning, everybody.
First I'd like to thank Nikesh
for having me here today to
talk about my business, and to
talk about being
an entrepreneur.
It's a great honor to to be
speaking in front of you,
and to be sitting in
this amazing panel.
And I'm not a serial
entrepreneur, I've only started
one business, but I believe
that it's still relevant to
what I'm doing with the rest of
the team for Net-a-Porter
to be on this panel.
Because in this fast-moving
technology world, where the
market is evolving so quickly,
you can actually take the
attitude of a serial
entrepreneur and apply
it to one business.
Now, before I tell you more
about Net-a-Porter, guys,
some of you, I have
some bad news for you.
Contrary to what some of you
men in the audience have been
told by the women in your
life, Net-a-Porter is
not a health food store.
And it's not a charity.
And even looking at those
debits it's on a monthly basis
and talking about it at home,
you'd be surprised, a lot of
women have kept this secret to
themselves, and a lot of
men actually think that
Net-a-Porter's also got
something to do with porter.
Maybe being a
concierge service.
There are a lot of
misconceptions about
the business.
But the one thing's for sure,
is Net-a-Porter is about women,
and a women's market, and what
women love to do certainly
includes shopping and reading
fashion magazines, and the
internet has allowed us
an amazing opportunity
to target one group.
And I started
Net-a-Porter 2000.
We've gone from three people
in a room in Chelsea to 300
people in two continents.
We've gone from serving our
website to customers who
access us on a dialup, now
to broadband and WiFi.
We've gone from the capacity to
do 1,000 orders in one year,
to thousands in a day.
And through all of this, we've
stayed very constant to the
fact that we're about fashion,
we're about women, we're about
lowest common technology
denominator, and we want to
make it simple, we want to make
it easy for women to access our
site, and we've been
about service.
But since they are so many men
in the audience, I thought it
was important to tell you a
little bit more about what
Net-a-Porter is about so that
Danny and I can then have a
conversation where we're
all in on the secret.
So if you could roll the video.
[BEGIN VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
DANNY: Good stuff!
OK, that puts it
in perspective.
Thank you.
NATALIE MASSENET: Yes.
So I hope the women
know about it.
DANNY: No question.
I have witnessed those
bills, personally.
NATALIE MASSENET: Good.
I'm sorry, Danny.
DANNY: Yeah.
I understand.
So, tell us about
how this happened.
You were at Tatler, and you had
this wacky idea to do this?
NATALIE MASSENET: Actually I'm
a journalist, and I tried
to convince several people
that they should do this.
It was at the time when the
Pashmina was the big worldwide
craze, and suddenly overnight
every woman from Hong Kong, to
London, to New Jersey needed to
have a Pashmina, they had to
have them in every color.
And a friend of mine was
importing them and selling them
to John Lewis and Harrod's.
And I said to her, why sell it
with a wholesale profit when
you can actually go
direct to consumer?
Have you seen this
thing, the internet?
You could just create a
website, and sell these
Pashminas to women all around
the world from one location,
and take the entire margin.
And she said, oh no no no,
I don't even know how
to turn on a computer.
And I tried to convince her,
and I then tried to convince
other people to do it, and as a
journalist, you do see some
amazing ideas come, and you
write about them, and I
thought, you know what, maybe
this is one I can throw
myself into, and I'll do it.
And with absolutely no idea
of what it took to start a
business, but with an end
goal in sight, I started it.
And I was very lucky, because I
had amazing people around me
from day one who were able to
advise me or contribute to the
business, but it started
really from just the desire
that it should exist.
DANNY: All right.
And has fashion always
been your passion?
NATALIE MASSENET: Yes.
And I mean, I love film.
And possibly some of my love
for film shows up in trying to
create an online experience.
I love the fact that you can
take a group of people, and
turn the lights down, and
alter their experience
for a little bit.
And I think the internet is
such a personal medium that,
for the women who come to our
site, they're able to interface
with this technology and really
get sucked into this new world.
But I love fashion, yeah.
DANNY: So you know, what's
interesting as someone who's
witnessed a the bunch of the
e-tailing, e-commerce sites
that have come about, it's
actually gone in
multiple waves.
I don't know if you do agree
with this, but when I first
started using Amazon about ten
years ago, I would go there to
search for one product, and I'd
come out with buying
ten products.
And so it was a great means of
actually converting me into a
much bigger buyer than what
I had initially decided
than I was going to be.
And if you, and I don't know
about your use of Amazon today,
but now I use Amazon as
a fulfillment mechanism.
I actually don't really
venture there and explore.
And actually one of the
difficulties of this whole web
2.0 space from our perspective,
is the fact that you have
certain sites that are great
for exploration, but are
terrible for fulfillment, and
you have other sites that are
great for fulfillment, but have
really sort of given
up on exploration.
And you guys seem to really
focus on both elements.
NATALIE MASSENET: I think it's
important to control the
entire customer experience.
And certainly we never forget
that we're also a service
and fulfillment company.
From day one we were
global, shipping to every
country in the world.
If the consumer wanted to buy
online, and get a product,
they could have it delivered.
We worked with partners
such as DHL to deliver
the goods worldwide.
And we created a taxes and
duties paid system so that
products could be expedited
through customs, and we could
do overnight delivery
throughout Europe, two-day
delivery to the far
east and Asia.
And we've also sped it up,
because consumers today
want everything faster.
So we do same-day delivery in
London, same-day delivery in
Manhattan, two of the most
important markets for us.
But we, as we continue to
develop our business, we very
much believe in investing in
the experience, in making it
richer, having more content,
more video, but always fused
with this idea that there's an
end experience and an end
user who's going to be
expecting a delivery.
And I think a lot of the
businesses today are just
focusing on trying attract all
the customers to one area,
through sites feature
comparative shopping, but they
leave the consumer hanging dry,
without actually addressing
that something has to be
delivered to them at the end.
And we've always put
the consumer first.
DANNY: And then in terms of,
on the video you talk about
52 weekly online magazine.
So what happens to your
predecessor boss, and what
happens to the whole
magazine industry?
You go to any airport, and
it's incredible, it's
all fashion, for women.
Pretty much.
I mean there's like,
decoration and stuff.
But it seems, I don't know, it
seems to be mostly fashion?
Is that true?
No?
I never go now!
There's the New Yorker and
stuff, but it's mostly fashion.
Anyway!
So what happens to
that industry?
NATALIE MASSENET: Well, you
know, I don't think that, if
Net-a-Porter didn't exist, the
magazine industry would have to
reinvent itself as well, and
hopefully there are some serial
entrepreneurs in the the
publishing companies,
they're all going to take
their content online.
I think that the monthly
glossies are going to have to
just create richer, more
interesting content,
more beautiful, they
can't rely on news.
We're all getting our fashion
news on a daily basis, whether
it's from style.com or any
of the daily news services.
But all the publishing
companies are certainly
looking to move online.
What Net-a-Porter is focusing
on is not just delivering the
news, but delivering the final
product to a global audience.
DANNY: So I assume that a lot
of those magazines actually
rely on advertising for the
lion's share of their revenue,
and I don't think you
guys do any advertising.
So what happens to that?
Well, we know we have an
amazing audience, and an
amazing demographic.
One woman in the room calls
them the superbabes!
These are women who hold down
amazing jobs, they're
time-poor, cash-rich, and we
get approached a lot by people
who want to market
to these women.
And we're actually, again,
thinking about the end user,
and thinking, what would
she like to know about?
Because she's captivated, she
comes to our side, and if there
are things that she should know
about, whether it's how to buy
the latest BMW, the latest skin
care products, how to plan her
financial wealth, because these
are smart women, then we should
actually filter through some
of those services to her.
And you could potentially
call it advertising.
But we would do it in a way
where the end consumer would
always be considered.
We do take some
advertising right now.
We have a print book called
Net-a-Porter Notes which
goes out twice a year
to our customers.
But again, we're always trying
to fuse content with commerce.
The print ads, you can actually
go online and click on them,
and buy the product in the ads.
So we want to eliminate this
feeling of the media telling
the customer, you have to have
a certain thing, and then she
has to go out and find it.
We want to make sure that
the two are linked.
DANNY: So it sounds, by the
way you're talking about
Net-a-Porter, you're pretty
much set there for the next
ten, fifteen years of work.
Is that fair?
So you're not really going on
the serial path, you might just
stick with Net-a-Porter and
make it the biggest fashion
buying experience in the world.
NATALIE MASSENET:
That's the idea.
And I think that we're an
amazing team in the business,
and we live the history of so
many businesses within weeks.
And innovations that
change the course of our
business every month.
And it's exciting.
I think the day that it gets
boring, I guess we'll stop.
DANNY: Great.
Thank you very much, Natalie.
