Brent Hoberman is back. The co-founder of lastminute.com
transformed the way we book a romantic getaway and now he wants to spice up
one of the most mundane experiences on the high street — shopping for
furniture.
No longer, he believes, will we have to take a deep breath and get in the car
so that, eventually, we can arrive at a warehouse to traipse round in the
hope of finding a suitable sofa.
The star of the dot-com boom has dreamed up mydeco.com,
a website that will allow homemakers, DIY enthusiasts and interior designers
to view every armchair that the high street has to offer from the comfort of
the one they intend to replace.
Mr Hoberman has rediscovered his creativity during two years out of the public
eye. “We are going to change the way you design and shop for your home,” he
says.
The idea threatens to deliver a fatal blow to the likes of Land of Leather and
ScS Upholstery, which are contending with a severe slowdown, yet Mr Hoberman
is marketing himself as their cyber saviour. Despite dismissing the high
street as little more than a theme park these days — “I still take the kids
there, they like to go and see stuff” - Mr Hoberman insists that mydeco will
help retailers to sell more.
Just as lastminute.com brought together short breaks and flights offered by
companies around the world, mydeco will showcase rugs, coffee tables, lights
and wardrobes made by anyone and everyone.
So far, 500 retailers have signed up, from independent traders to the biggest
names, such as Marks & Spencer, John Lewis and Argos.
Typically for a man who has an IT system to run the bath before he wakes up,
Mr Hoberman is using the latest software to entice customers to the site.
Visitors will be able to recreate their rooms in 3D virtual reality so that
they can visualise how potential purchases will look, paint the walls in any
number of colours and even put down wooden flooring.
Mydeco will make its money from advertising and by taking a “very modest” cut
from every purchase made through it.
Martha Lane Fox, the other half of the lastminute.com success story and one of
Mr Hoberman's closest friends, has shown her approval by becoming a
non-executive director, popping in one day a week. A Who's Who of private
shareholders, including Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype, have
invested a combined £5million.
Mr Hoberman, 39, is ready to throw himself into the unknown again, having
pocketed £26million from the sale of lastminute.com in 2005. He says: “I've
always thought you become a sad old bastard when you start thinking about
what you have done. You become defined by your past. The future is more
interesting. The second thing is restlessness. The excitement of building a
company is the best motivation to do it.”
If his wife Genevieve wonders where her husband has got to over the next year,
she has only herself to blame: mydeco stems from her love of interior
design.
When lastminute.com was a mere glint in Mr Hoberman's eye in 1996, he was
trying to encourage Genevieve to launch a website on which people could
share tips on doing up their homes. Two years ago, as Mr Hoberman struggled
to do up the family home in London, the idea gained fresh momentum.
He says: “We were doing up the house for ages and I was finding it really
hard, really difficult to visualise things. My wife would say: ‘Shall we get
this chair or this one?' And I'd be like: ‘I have absolutely no clue, no
idea what you are talking about.'
“Then I went online, thinking the net must help me, but I was having to spend
a lot of time finding sites. There was no central place that aggregated
everything. I thought there really is an opportunity here. Not even Google
can tell me where I can buy a red leather sofa.”
Mr Hoberman wants mydeco to do all this and more. As well as offering every
type of furniture, he wants the website to provide visitors with the
location of the nearest branch of a store they like, as well as real-time
photographs of the stock.
Social networking will also play a central role, with the mydeco “community”
encouraged to write blogs, post photos, share tips and offer suggestions on
furniture, designs and even how to hire the right builder.Eventually Mr
Hoberman wants to perfect a service that rates products by their “lifetime
value”. If a chair will last only a year, mydeco will, he hopes, be able to
tell you.
He says: “If something costs £4,000 and a similar-looking product £100 we need
to explain the trade-off. Why should something cost 40 times as much? We
want people to be open and say it's £50 because it's junk and lasts a year.”
Rather than being put off by the gloom surrounding the high street, Mr
Hoberman says that is why his timing is spot-on. “It's going to sound
strange, but I honestly don't think there could be a better time,” he says.
“Retailers want to work with third parties more aggressively in a downturn
so they become even more open to new opportunities.”
Mr Hoberman points to the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, when hotels
reacted to the prospect of empty rooms by offering online travel companies,
such as lastminute.com and Expedia, far better deals. As a result he
believes that customers have learnt that the best offers are available on
the internet.
“I think retailers should see us as a catalyst for business,” he says. “We are
research and development for them. We can do things, make mistakes and we
both learn. They should view us as a customer acquisition tool.
“In the UK 2.5 per cent of all furniture is bought online compared with 10 per
cent in the US. We think we're in a £20billion market in the UK, for
furniture, appliances and contractors. A 10 per cent share of that is
£2billion and we would be expecting just under a quarter of that to be going
through the mydeco website in two to three years' time.”
Mr Hoberman's boundless energy is a marked contrast to how he felt when
stepping down from lastminute in May 2006, ten months after he and Ms Lane
Fox had sold the business to Travelocity Europe for $1.1billion
(£560million). He says that life in charge of a public company sapped almost
all his enthusiasm for the job and it is clear that, however successful
mydeco becomes, Mr Hoberman is unlikely to be the individual who would lead
the new website into a stock market flotation.
“I'm still passionate about lastminute.com and I still love to see them do
well,” he says, “but the learning curve, the ability to innovate, reduces
when you get that big.
“The responsibility of managing people increases a lot more, the
responsibility to cut costs increases a lot more and you get less time to do
the things you enjoy.
“Repetition is also a big thing. You go through days and days of meetings with
fund managers, repeating yourself 100 times, as that is what you are being
paid to do by your shareholders, but that's not stimulating, by any stretch
of the imagination.
“I love not running a public company and there were times when if I could have
taken lastminute private I would have.”
Mr Hoberman's views explain the structure of the boardroom at mydeco. He has
taken the role of executive chairman, with David Kelly, the former chief
operating officer of eBay Europe, the chief executive. Mr Kelly was also at
lastminute.com, as was mydeco's chief technology officer, Paul Chudleigh.
On leaving lastminute.com, a business that he and Ms Lane Fox initially ran
from his living room, Mr Hoberman was deluged with offers of work. “For a
while, two non-executive boardroom roles a day,” he says.
He accepted only one, becoming non-executive chairman at Wayn.com, a travel
and leisure social networking site. Mr Hoberman is also an angel investor in
several start-ups, including the Lucky Voice karoke bar chain run by Ms Lane
Fox.
Some track the success of television shows such as Dragons' Den and The
Apprentice to the lastminute.com story. Mr Hoberman will go only as far as
to say that he and Ms Lane Fox were part of a new generation that has
encouraged people, including close friends, to give business a go. He hopes
that it continues.
He says: “People probably saw us, two consultants, relatively young, who were
able to build a business worth $1billion in 18 months and thought: ‘Hey, all
I need is a business plan and someone to believe in me and I can do that.' I
don't want to take all the credit. Charles Dunstone [the founder of Carphone
Warehouse] was doing it. Sir Richard Branson is still the one that stands
out.
“But hopefully we're finally moving away from that British attitude of wanting
someone to fail and moving more towards the American one of wanting people
to succeed.
“Hopefully we're moving from feeling that a little piece of us dies when
someone does well to thinking: ‘Why don't I get up and do that myself?'”
Leader questioned
If you could change one thing in the financial and commercial environment,
what would it be?
I would create more physical hubs for entrepreneurs and subsidise office space
in return for charitable contributions if the company succeeds
Who is or was your mentor?
My father and my South African grandfather
Does money motivate you?
It is a great side-effect of building good businesses. But the best
entrepreneurs view it as that — it’s not where the main satisfaction of
running a business comes from
What is the most important event of your working life?
Getting fired from my first job for being a prima donna
What gadget must you have?
A system that runs my bath before my alarm clock goes off
What does leadership mean to you?
Inspiring people to get the best out of themselves (even it means they have to
work through the night)
Which business person do you most admire?
My grandfather, Leonard Shawzin, who had one clothes shop and built it into
650 across Africa
How do you relax?
Being in the sun with my daughters and my wife
C.V.
Born: November 25, 1968
Education: Eton College; New College, Oxford University.
Career: Co-founded lastminute.com in April 1998 with Martha Lane Fox.
Remained chief executive until April 2006. At present non-executive board
director of Guardian Media Group and non-executive chairman of Wayn.com, a
travel and leisure social network with more than 10 million members
Family: Married, two daughters
Other interests: Governor of the University of the Arts, London; an
angel investor in several internet companies;playing football, tennis,
browsing the internet, travel
