The “Nasty” Effect: Exploring E-Comm’s New Volatility

After becoming a brand that so many fashion technology startups saw as an example to model, Sophia Amoruso’s edgy Ebay-cum-clothing business, Nasty Gal took an unexpected turn towards bankruptcy this past week.

The news, which was made public on 11/9, comes just a few weeks after the announcement was made that Amoruso would step down from the helm of the company. She surrendered the top spot in 2015 to Lululemon alum, Sheree Waterson. In operation for 10 years, Nasty Gal had raised a total of $65 million to date. Index Ventures was the company’s primary backer, with a $49 million investment in 2012. In February of last year former Apple and JC Penney retail executive, Ron Johnson invested an additional $16 million, with the goal to grow the company’s retail footprint, comprised of two stand-alone outposts in LA and Santa Monica.

“The investment horizon, scale trajectory and realm of likely exit outcomes for tech enabled brands differ significant fromly traditional tech companies and require a different capitalization and growth strategy ,” says Natalie Hwang, who manages Simon Venture Group, an early stage venture capital fund based in NYC that is exclusively focused on investing in next generation commerce and retail technology. “Brands that grow too quickly and expand too widely run the risk of trivialization of brand equity through overexposure. If you try to engineer a path to scale for a brand that resembles that of a Google or Facebook without placing some constraints on growth for the sake of maintaining brand desirability and cachet, you can very likely implode these companies. There is still the potential to generate compelling investment returns but the financing strategy requires efficient use of capital.”

Another potential issue with these well-funded retail businesses, according to Hwang, is that they are actually very niche, which makes it hard for them to expand their customer pool.

“Growth is easier to achieve in the early days as online distribution provides businesses with the ability to reach customers without the constraints of geography. Brands can grow rapidly at first because they are able to reach customers wtih whom their message resonates really easily at first. But as the company scales, faces increasing competition and a diminishing pool of customers, the acquisition of each incremental customer becomes much more difficult and expensive to acquire. Brands will eventually reach a natural saturation point.” says Hwang. “ You can continue to stimulate growth through distribution expansion, by building new geographic locations but the slope and velocity of growth will start to flatline. Most brands will be niche in size because a brand is the expression of a very particular opinion, with the exception being those brands that have the special ability to build a mass market culture around what they do. Apple is an example. ”

One venture investor in the consumer space agrees and says, “I think Nasty Gal was unable to handle its meteoric rise, growth-wise, as it wasn’t sure how to keep consistently responding to their customers. [I believe] also that Sophia was having difficulty personally handling that fast rise and while she made the right hires. It’s just hard to manage the niche the company carved out, product portfolio wise.”

Exactly how well Nasty Gal has been doing has been challenging to deduce, according to WWD, which last reported a company revenue of about $130 million in 2014. Meanwhile, Forbes valued the business last year at over $300 million. The brand’s outposts have been equally hard to gauge, in terms of sales,as Nasty Gal executives reportedly told WWD that “they were still learning from the two stores before determining next steps for the brand” when asked for a performance update over the past year.

“It’s important to avoid inferring long-term growth from short term growth,” said Hwang, adding that until you can develop a better view for a brand’s potential market reach and size, they are often times better off pricing themselves conservatively and raising capital consistent with most likely exits. “If these businesses run the risk of becoming overly financed, they will fail to yield a return to investors despite having generated hundreds of millions in a year and having built a very successful business.”

Despite the growth of e-tail sales in the US, which Marketer Inc. estimates is increasing at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 14% over the next four years, topping out at $434.2 billion in 2017, there is clearly difficulty in the landscape. The challenge seems to be affecting those e-tailers who have been around for about a decade.

“Many of these brands that originated online about 10 years plus ago were focused on leveraging online distribution to grow their companies very rapidly with the broad reach of the Internet and to build a modern brand with the use of digital tools,” says Hwang. “When they started they weren’t even thinking about distribution expansion. What we’re seeing these days is that the online and offline consumer are one and the same and what he or share cares about is the quality and ubiquity of seamless commerce. It will become increasingly important for brands to serve their customers through multiple touchpoints, create a compelling brand experience for consumers to buy into, and allow them to funnel their purchase intent depending upon their shopping need state through various channels and devices.”

Experts say that despite the vast opportunity that continues to exist in the e-tail industry, more saturation means there are stiffer benchmarks to proving success, and investors can get cold feet if profits aren’t high within the first year of business. For fashion e-commerce companies that have been in existence for a few years, reinvention is another challenge, as consumers are always moving to the next platform, in this case those with proprietary technology assets.

According to Hwang, companies like Uber and Etsy, which may spend a lot, but are also focused on re-investing it have the staying power she looks for when seeking the next investable idea. “The cost structure for how you scale up in e-commerce has proven every expensive because moth of the growth has been bought rather than organically acquired,” she says. “I like to see companies growing early almost by accident.” However, in a statement made in WWD, Nasty Gal executives say the move into bankruptcy will ultimately strengthen the company.

“Our decision to initiate a court-supervised restructuring will enable us to address our immediate liquidity issues, restructure our balance sheet and correct structural issues including reducing our high occupancy costs and restoring compliance with our debt covenants,” Nasty Gal chief executive officer Sheree Waterson told WWD. “We expect to maintain our high level of customer service and emerge stronger and even better able to deliver the product and experience that our customers expect and that we take pride in bringing to market.”

Additionally, the “Amazon effect” as it is known is also a factor in the new volatile e-commerce climate. According to recent industry figures, Amazon is the leading e-retailer in the United States with more than 107 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 net sales. While fashion is still not a main focus, it is reported, as of the fourth quarter of 2015, that the e-retailer claimed more than 304 million active customer accounts worldwide. “Due to Amazon’s global scope and reach, it is also considered one of the most valuable brands worldwide,” according to Statista.  Clearly e-tailers looking for staying power are challenged more than ever to deliver a unique product at a competitive price.

Either way, it seems one thing for sure, selling via the Internet is not going anywhere. Brands can no longer rest on their laurels of large audiences as a key to success and now must think multi-dimensionally in order to mimic the way consumers are actually shopping; which is everywhere.

“Five years ago, the online and offline worlds were seen as separate and distinct, but truth of it is that the line between the two is a very hard one to draw. We live in a connected world,” says Hwang. “What has shifted is that the concept of shopping has shifted from owning things to buying into new ideas or values.  A product or service is powerful because of its ability to impactfully connect people to those ideas or values and represent something about ourselves.”