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Lastminute.com's Brent Hoberman is back in business with interior design website, mydeco.com Along with business partner, Martha Lane Fox, Brent Hoberman gave us lastminute.com and helped revolutionise how we buy our holidays. Now he wants to do the same for interior design with his new baby, mydeco.com. One of Britain's best known internet entrepreneurs, Brent Hoberman, has launched a new website, mydeco.com which promises to transform the way we shop for furniture, soft furnishings and everything else that goes towards making a house a home. Hoberrman, 39, shot to fame during the dotcom boom as co-founder of lastminute.com, a business he sold in July, 2005, to Travelocity Europe for US$1.1 billion. Since the sale, which netted him a reputed £26 million, he continued with lastminute.com as chief executive until April 2006 and has since been involved in a number of projects. He's tried his hand as an angel investor in a number of online businesses including ticket exchange viagogo.com and home moving site moveme.com. He's currently on the board of the Guardian Media Group, he's invested in internet companies including ticket exchange website, viagogo.com, and home removal site, moveme.com, and he is chairman of WAYN, a social networking site for travellers that has quickly gathered eight million members in its ranks. But mydeco.com is his new baby as he seeks to revolutionise the way we furnish and decorate our homes. As the caption reads, "it's wipe your feet and come on in" time. The website brings together the widest possible range of products from high street stores to niche retailers, with over 500 retailers already signed up and no doubt more clamouring at the door to be included. As well as "thousands of inspiring looks to fit your budget", expert designers are on hand to offer advice and there are 3D planning tools to help you design your ideal rooms. Inspiration for the site came from his own failed attempts to use the internet to help re-decorate his own home. He saw a gap in the market, and like any entrepreneur worth his salt, has set about filling it. £5 million has been raised to bankroll the new site and he has been joined on the board by David Kelly (veteran of lastminute.com, amazon.co.uk and eBay.co.uk) and Paul Chudleigh (another old mucker from lastminute.com). And Martha Lane Fox, the other co-founder of lastminute.com, is a non-executive director of the new company. If mydeco.com had been launched back in the late 1990s, it wouldn't have worked (think boo.com), but so much has changed since then, not least of all far better technology and the fact that 60% of internet users in the UK are now on broadband. And of course, a website like mydeco.com wouldn't be complete without a social networking element that will foster a real sense of community amongst its users. Revenue for the website will come via advertising and a commission on everything sold through its pages. The plan is to capture a £500million share of the market in two to three years' time, as the online furniture and furnishings market expands in the UK from its current £350 million to an estimated £2 billion. Currently only 2.5% of sales in this market are made online, compared to 10% in the States. 5th February 2008 Comment on this article |
Five Questions to find out what makes an internet entrepreneur tick?  "I believe some people have a little something in their head that makes them look at things in a slightly different way. Some people absolutely cannot envisage doing anything but working for somebody else - and that is fine. However I believe entrepreneurs are born and will always find a way to do things differently." Kieron Donoghue, ukoffer.com Take one internet entrepreneur - for instance Kieron Donoghue (pictured above) - and ask them Five Questions. Also in the Five Questions hot seat this month is Victoria Vanstone of yourdeathwish.com. Why niche websites are like flowers George Marshall reckons that niche websites are like flowers and need to be nurtured just as you would a plant. more |
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