Word: dotcomism
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...Some luxury brands jumped on the e-commerce bandwagon during the dotcom boom in the late 1990s, only to bust with the bubble in the early part of the current decade. So they're reluctant to try again. There's also an older wariness dating back to the 1980s, when too many designer brands went on licensing sprees that cheapened their pedigree. "Since then, the mantra has all been about control of brand. And to some, the net looks like the Wild West," explains Guy Salter, deputy chairman of Walpole, the British luxury brands trade association that collaborated...
...sales hit a peak of $1.3 billion in 1995 but steadily declined as the dotcom boom threatened to obliterate neckwear entirely and business casual took hold in the workplace. Just last week the Men's Dress Furnishings Association, which represents American tiemakers, announced it will close its doors. Still, some analysts see an upside in the current economic downturn: laid-off workers looking to stand out in job interviews could spark a tie-wearing boom...
...coffins which is arguably a little distasteful but, you know, you had to do that sort of thing if you wanted to catch the attention of the papers. And all of this because we didn't have any money to spend. So a typical company, launching in the dotcom world at that time, would have had a huge marketing budget if they were serious. We didn't have that, so we had to make what we had work extra hard for us, but we did get few people's attention...
...Wray: Looking back now, one of the best things that happened to us was that we didn't raise lots of money. Because dotcom companies were throwing money around right, left and center and because we couldn't afford to do that we thought very hard about what we applied our money to. For example, that picture with the two of us and a bookie pretending to be in a coffin, which was very tongue-in-cheek, was the front page of the Sunday Times business section three days before we launched...
...stuff you might expect. The concerns have always been "can this company rise to the occasion here?," because here we were, in my eyes, a bunch of earnest amateurs, who were getting stuck in but we were just this tiny little company, a bunch of guys without any dotcom heritage who didn't really know what they were doing but were feeling their way around, and we knew we had to turn ourselves into something much bigger, much more solid, much more dependable, reliable, and a big functional, corporate entity...