This evening on Dragons’ Den an Entrepreneur from Devon, Matthew Conridge of Mamka Ltd, asked for a £200k investment for his online business turning over approaching £2m per year.
Matthew in typical eBay fashion started the business with just £600 from his garage but it’s now located in a 42,000sq foot warehouse in Crediton, Devon. Sadly in not untypical Dragons’ Den style he floundered somewhat under questioning and failed to secure an investment.
One interesting question was does Mamka own their own website code – his reply was that it’s based on the software from a multichannel software provider. The multichannel management provider that they use is eSellerPro and I bet that they’re kicking themselves that their name wasn’t mentioned when the program aired this evening. What also wasn’t revealed on the show is that a proportion of Mamka’s sales aren’t on their own website – some are on and Amazon.
Unfortunately at the time of airing Mamka’s websites (not hosted by eSellerPro) all went down – it looks like they didn’t have sufficient bandwidth for the traffic generated from Dragons’ Den. The sites became available again about an hour after the show ended.
You can watch tonight’s Dragons’ Den show on BBC iPlayer. I’m always in awe of the businesses that appear on Dragon’s Den and Mamka isn’t the first eBay related business to appear, back in 2008 Andrew Horsley was successful in securing investment from Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan for his company Rapstrap.
Hopefully Matthew will be at the eSellerPro conference taking place on Thursday this week. If you’re attending Matthew come and find me, I’d love to buy you a pint and find out more about your experience on Dragons Den!
3 Responses
Just watched it. He might have done better if he didn’t keep interupting the Dragons.
I think the Dragon’s criticism was fair.
Contrast his experience to a company like SkinnyDip from a week or so ago that are very much focused on creating their own intellectual property for the Dragon’s to invest in.
What was clear from their cross-examination was that the business was holding too much stock and turning it too slowly.
The eCommerce companies that we see growing the fastest are buying the best and clearing the decks regularly to further refine their core product set.