Traditionally retailers mark up items by just under three times. If they sell something for £1,000, for example, they pay the designer about £380, leaving a margin of £620. Under the sale or return system, they would make £200 on a £1,000 item.
‘Then there are a slew of import and export duties under Brexit,’ continues Kingham. ‘Every time you sold something to a customer in Europe and they sent it back because it didn’t fit or whatever, under the free-returns system it cost the business a small fortune. I remember looking at the numbers and thinking, I just don’t see how this is going to work.’
E-retail is not the cheap alternative to bricks-and-mortar that was once promised. Marketing costs have spiralled. Returns often run at 40 per cent – although no one wants to admit this officially. Photography, copywriting to go with the thousands of items uploaded every week, courier services and – if you want to avoid extra duties – several warehouses inside and outside the UK all add up.
Kingham left Matches in 2021, well before the Frasers Group takeover, and is now a consultant and mentor to many designers and retailers. ‘I kept telling the ones on Matches they had to make sure they got paid. But I think everyone was so reliant on those orders they didn’t want to believe it wouldn’t work.’
It especially didn’t work for the designers. Thanks to the torturous economics of the clothing industry, it’s always been the case that they have to invest in fabrics and design at least 18 months before they see any revenue.
The story of how one visionary British couple built Matches, arguably the most glamorous and fashion-forward global online empire of them all, over the course of 30 years from a single boutique in Wimbledon; then sold it in 2017 to private equity firm Apax, at which point it was reported to have been valued at £800 million; before it fell into the hands of Mike Ashley, founder of Frasers Group, for a mere £52 million, is a cautionary, roller-coaster tale for our times. But it’s not even the whole picture. Merchants like Ruth Chapman, Natalie Kingham and Natalie Massenet, the former fashion editor who founded Net-a-Porter in 2000, were arbiters and mentors whose taste shaped a generation of consumers and helped guide designers as to what they needed to have in their collections.
‘Ruth had the best eye,’ says JJ Martin, founder of La DoubleJ, a clothing and homeware brand that looked so promising that in 2023 Maureen Chiquet, a former CEO of Chanel, joined as chairwoman. There is no indication that La DoubleJ is at risk, but Martin knows that Matches’ demise leaves parts of the industry hollowed out.
‘It’s not just money lost… It’s not having someone like Ruth, Tom and Natalie to provide mentorship. As a young brand, being picked up by Matches was as important as being featured in American Vogue.’
Until, that is, more recently, when Matches entered a going-for-growth Armageddon, stocking more middling brands with similar products. An online shopping experience that had felt luxurious and thoughtfully curated evolved into a doomscroll. ‘Urgh, the scroll,’ says Deborah Brett. ‘They had page after page of almost identical items – shopping on it became the antithesis of enjoyable.’