Remember when you used to have to go out to the shops to buy some clothes?
All that hassle; getting to town, parking, walking, rain, crowds, queues, changing rooms, more queues, etcetera etcetera. A pain in the hoop to put it mildly. And you now know how you don’t really have to bother with any of that if you want to buy some clothes thanks to online shopping?
Well Natalie Massanet is the woman to thank for that. It was she who thought of the very first virtual clothes stores, shops full of clothes hidden right there inside your little computer. Who would have thought it? Tiny little stores full of clothes hidden inside computers. Amazing what they can do with technology these days. Ok not really…
Massanet pictured with her boyfriend Erik Torstensson
But Massanet was a visionary, she saw at an early stage in her career as a fashion writer and stylist was a website in magazine format from where you could buy designer clothes. With that she quit her job in journalism and from her London living room, with 1.2 million pounds of her then-husbands money, she went about creating Net-A-Porter, the online luxury shopping destination. Her biggest job was to convince the designer brands, and more importantly the high stake investors behind these luxury brands to try and sell their goods without an actual physical retail outlet. There was naturally resistance…
Her first win was with Roland Mouret, who agreed to join her virtual retail world and the other big names quickly followed suit. The site has gone from strength to strength since and today Net-a-Porter stocks over two hundred labels and employs 2,500 people.
In 2013 Net-A-Porter’s older brother, Mr. Porter, arrived online, a sophisticated gentleman if ever there was one. You can browse manly, intellectual journals, watch videos on how to dress in different ways, learn new fashion words, and of course men can shop luxury items in a quintessentially masculine shopping space… right there inside your own computer! Who would have thought it? Natalie Massanet; that’s who…
This style and fashion help is available on the Mr Porter website. Image via Mr Porter
The lovely woman incidentally now dates Erik Torstensson, a Danish photographer and co-founder of digital media agency The Saturday Group as well as being Editor-in-Chief at Industrie magazine. The Net-A-Porter company is today valued at 350 million pounds, not bad for someone who originally started working out of her own living room…
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