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.
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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.