Online Menswear Retailer The Idle Man Quickly Raises £500,000 Equity Crowdfunding

The Idle Man Blue

Menswear retailer The Idle Man quickly jumped out of the gate topping £500,000 in just two days of equity crowdfunding on Crowdcube.  The funding round benefited from a single private equity group that committed £449,990.  The balance was invested by 73 individual investors.  New investors were also given a perk of receiving 20% off all full price merchandise until the end of the year. The offer expects to raise £750,000 for 23.07% equity in the “pure-play” online retailer.They now expect to reach their target of £750,000 in less than a week.  This is the company’s 3rd funding round.Oliver Tezcan

TheIdleman is the creation of Oliver Tezcan, the founder of menswear at Asos.com – a publicly listed ecommerce platform.

Tezcan said the “response to our crowd-sourced funding has exceeded our most optimistic expectations… we were over two-thirds there after less than two days”.

The Idle ManAsked about the single large investor, Tezcan responded; “We were aware that we had one institutional investor that was willing to invest a substantial part of the next funding round. The investor is private equity group Foresight Nottingham and they did extensive due diligence on TheIdleman.com recently which should add further confidence that it’s a sound investment”.

The men’s fashion retailer expects to generate annual revenue of around £1.2 million for their financial year of 2014/2015.

According to the company investors decided to put money into the online retailer partly due to the swift increase in traffic that the site has seen in the past two quarters. Monthly unique users are up 30% month on month, revenues up 70% month on month and turnover at Christmas was described as impressive delivering a £235,000 turnover in the last quarter.

 


The Idle ManThe business was founded back in January 2014. Tezcan was previously the Buying Manager for Men’s Brands at the multi-million turnover online retailer from 2006 to 2013. He is joined by co-founder Alex Outlaw who is CMO of TheIdleman and had previously worked at Bauer Media and IPC.

Tezcan advised, “We have got the right team in place at TheIdleman all of which have got an excellent track record in online fashion retail and marketing. The first year of business has seen rapid growth and the traffic to the site has exceeded expectations – numbers of users and repeat users have exceeded our expectations and basket spend significantly increased as customers now trust the site and the recommendations to up-selling. All of these things in place have made us attractive to investors.”

“The new injection of funds is for us to press on with our existing PR and marketing plans as well as adding new collections to the already extensive list of menswear brands on offer.”

“It was more than just the financial input that we wanted”, added Tezcan. “It was important for us to get the general public to see what we were doing and to believe in us. This marketing aspect of the crowd sourced funding was just as important as the money.”


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