David Laurie is identifying his biggest-selling line. It is a replacement rack to hold cutlery in the dishwasher.

“We sell thousands. People push knives and forks into them, and they cut away the bottom.” Then they fall through and jam that thing that swivels around and sprays water underneath, I suggest.

“The spring arm — that’s what it’s called. There’s so many words I’ve learnt in the past 18 months. You’ve no idea.” Another is “crisper”, apparently the correct name for plastic drawers at the bottom of the fridge to store vegetables. Every wheel, widget and grommet in household appliances seems to have its own dedicated name.

Most of them are probably stored somewhere in the warehouse of eSpares at Lots Road, on the outskirts of Chelsea, West London. This is an online business that sells 350,000 spare parts for a huge range of household products, including cookers, fridges, vacuum cleaners and garden equipment such as mowers and trimmers.

The warehouse is an Aladdin’s Cave of strangely shaped tubing, seals, knobs, filters and sundry unidentifiable devices. It is so full that they are moving it all across the river to Battersea and a less cluttered premises this year, though the offices will remain at Lots Road.

The basic idea behind eSpares is simple enough. Most people would rather fix a household item than buy a new one, but manufacturers, though required by European legislation to hold parts for a given period, have little real interest in selling them.

“The manufacturers supply spare parts, but it’s not part of their business. They push boxes, not bits,” Mr Laurie, the company’s chief executive, says. “On the whole they are conscious of their responsibility to manufacture and supply spare parts. What they are not interested in, on the whole, is selling them individually to consumers.”

His business buys many of the parts in bulk and keeps them until they are requested by customers. Larger items, such as washing machine or oven doors, might be ordered as one-offs.

It is a classic “long tail” B2C business, to use the jargon of internet retail. B2C means business-toconsumer, rather than business-to-business. The “long tail” is a phrase coined by Chris Anderson, the tech writer, in a book of that name to account for the success of e-retailers such as Amazon or specialist booksellers such as AbeBooks and Alibris. The average high street retailer can stock only the most popular lines, but internet sellers can also keep a huge backlog of seldom-ordered items in a warehouse for dispatch when they are wanted. Mr Laurie says that the top 1,000 bestselling items account for 62 per cent of his turnover. These include dishwasher racks, a huge array of knobs for cookers and elsewhere in the kitchen, oven seals and vacuum cleaner bags.

The top 5,000 account for 80 per cent of the business. So about 345,000 seldom-ordered products, his “long tail”, provide a fifth of the business. Assuming that these are properly priced, this is still profitable. He reckons that about 90 per cent of what he sells can be fitted by the average householder. For more difficult jobs, his company has explanatory videos on YouTube.

Internet retailers such as Amazon and eBay rely heavily on customer feedback on their sites. Mr Laurie launched his own equivalent, on which customers could post their experiences, last October. “We’re selling bits of plastic, not luxury items or first-class BA tickets,” he explains. Such feedback can only encourage custom. The site has already taken 14,000 reviews from customers.

Many manufacturers — and eSpares deals with about 500 — charge premium prices for spare parts, in part because of the time it takes to fill single orders and in part to encourage purchase of new appliances. “Pricing is the biggest challenge I have in this business,” he admits. “They [the customers] are very savvy people. They might come to buy something for ten or fifteen quid. But if they buy something for £5.99 and they feel they have got some value there, they will be a returning customer.”

Inevitably, hard times breed a “make do and mend” approach. “That’s one of the effects of the downturn we’re seeing, as people are going much more out of their way to service things. But this is a commonsense business — in any economic climate we should do well. People should look after things.”

The business is even seasonal. Inevitably, parts for lawnmowers and strimmers start to move as sheds are cleared out in the early summer. But the highest sales of knobs and other kitchen spares is during the run-up to Christmas, as cooks smarten the place up for the festive season.

This is Mr Laurie’s second internet venture. After a “very secure Hampstead upbringing”, interrupted by the death of his father when he was 14, he went into property management, a field where both his father and grandfather had been respected figures. “I never really enjoyed it — I always felt people would look at you and think you did what you did because you had a useful last name.”

In April 2001, a serendipitous meeting led him to found Brightview, which went on to combine ten consumer Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In 2007, he sold the company to BT for £16 million.

A venture capital investor in both Brightview and eSpares pointed him in the direction of the latter. The business had been founded by Simon Richards, an entrepreneur, in 2003, initially specialising in vacuum cleaner parts but then expanding elsewhere. By the end of 2007, Mr Richards wanted out and Mr Laurie and his backers, including another venture capital group, paid less than £10 million for it.

He was struck by the potential market and the fact that there are few comparable businesses. The 18-strong team at Lots Road includes a dispatch room that sends out thousands of items a day and a team manning the phones who talk customers through their requirements and dispense advice. “Never underestimate how important a call centre is,” he says. At Brightview, he had an unhappy experience with one in India, which had to be relocated because of security concerns.

Next is the Irish Republic and then probably the Low Countries. “There isn’t a single business like this in mainland Europe,” he claims, while manipulating a large washing machine door for the camera.

CV

Born: 1964

Educated: St Paul’s School, London

Career: 1987-90: Jones Lang Wootton and General Continental Investments, Paris; 1990-93: Fletcher King, property consultants; 1994-2001: Hatter Laurie, commercial property consultants, his own firm, specialising in the West End; April 2001: founded Brightview; 2007:Sold Brightview to BT; January 2008: Appointed chief executive, eSpares

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