The nastygal google ads are pointing to http://localhost/error.html Is this common? They are out of ad money and Google will not charge if pointed to localhost?
Google charges regardless of URL. This is just a mistake.
How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
31–40 of 123 posts
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#32The most interesting part of this to me is the purchase by Boohoo.com, itself capitalising on legendary dotcom failure boo.com's branding. It sounds very much like the parent is running a business model very similar to the "one last draw" model Warren Buffet was so successful with earlier in his career. It might make a lot of sense for the right type of investor, too. The growth won't likely be there in the long term…
I agree this was very interesting especially if it really only included just the brand name and the company's customer list:
> "Nasty Gal preparing to sell its brand name and other intellectual property for $20 million"
Was any remaining inventory included? Were the social network accounts included?... It's hard to judge a $20mm deal without knowing more info. But $20mm buys a lot of ads and other marketing campaigns. Also brands that target more specific age groups often have their brand name goodwill overvalued when bought. These companies must introduce themselves to a new younger batch of customers at a much higher cycle rate, which is hard to calculate for younger companies. There is a price for a brand name and a large instagram following, but $20mm (about a dollar per instagram follower for Nasty Gal) sounds very high.
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revenue is vanity. Profit is reality. Selling $85MM in 2014 is nifty, but fashion industry is hard. Average EBITA is maybe 10%: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-s... to realize how brutal it is. Let's piece this together... She had 280 FTE at 2013 and got into a lease for 500k sqft warehouse: http://www.inc.com/30under30/donna-fenn/nasty-gal-sophia-amo... At ~$60k/yr avg and we'll pretend a…
Revenue is often used as a vanity metric. On the other hand... revenue is tangible, profit is an accounting construct.
Would you elaborate? It seems the pile of money you have after paying expenses is tangible in the same way as the pile of money you receive.
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revenue is vanity. Profit is reality. Selling $85MM in 2014 is nifty, but fashion industry is hard. Average EBITA is maybe 10%: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-s... to realize how brutal it is. Let's piece this together... She had 280 FTE at 2013 and got into a lease for 500k sqft warehouse: http://www.inc.com/30under30/donna-fenn/nasty-gal-sophia-amo... At ~$60k/yr avg and we'll pretend a…
Revenue is often used as a vanity metric. On the other hand... revenue is tangible, profit is an accounting construct.
They're both tangible. Another is costs. Revenue - Costs That Are Absolutely Necessary = Profit in most honest way of doing accounting. Unless it's very inefficient, profit is one of better ways of measuring one's business success. It's what you keep after all. Alternatively, if in a growth stage, it's obviously revenue and customer growth with profit sacrificed for that. Still better to be profitable most of the time.
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#35The clothes were awful. It sounded like a good story from a distance, but if you looked at the catalog it was a definite maybe and if you saw the clothes in person you realized they used cheap materials and were photographed from the good angle.
One HN user wrote about why she liked them in a previous thread on Nasty Gal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923367
Wow!
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revenue is vanity. Profit is reality. Selling $85MM in 2014 is nifty, but fashion industry is hard. Average EBITA is maybe 10%: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-s... to realize how brutal it is. Let's piece this together... She had 280 FTE at 2013 and got into a lease for 500k sqft warehouse: http://www.inc.com/30under30/donna-fenn/nasty-gal-sophia-amo... At ~$60k/yr avg and we'll pretend a…
Revenue is often used as a vanity metric. On the other hand... revenue is tangible, profit is an accounting construct.
Money in the bank is tangible.
Revenue and profit are both accounting constructs.
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revenue is often used as a vanity metric. On the other hand... revenue is tangible, profit is an accounting construct.
Would you elaborate? It seems the pile of money you have after paying expenses is tangible in the same way as the pile of money you receive.
In small companies 'profit' vs. the salary you pay yourself is a fuzzy concept. Pamen profitable often means everyone is taking a pay cut, but they are also not going broke.
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#38The clothes were awful. It sounded like a good story from a distance, but if you looked at the catalog it was a definite maybe and if you saw the clothes in person you realized they used cheap materials and were photographed from the good angle.
Were the colors off as well? I have bought clothes from online retailers and the colors looked different in person.
Retailers don't have much of an incentive to accurately portray color in online catalogs. It's one thing to shill out lots of money for high-color-accuracy monitors, automatic color/light calibrators, and high-color-accuracy printers - for print materials, since the color printed is what the customer will actually see (excepting people with color blindness...).
But for online catalogs, the retailer doesn't control the color accuracy of the customer's computer or phone screen, so most of the time, the customer won't see the accurate colors anyway. So why bother?
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh dear - they closed the loophole. It's a shame, but if it's something they need to do to survive then fair play. I do wonder if these should be permitted on HN now though...
How could a site make an article behind a paywall that's available for free somewhere else, especially if it's not their article... getting money from others work seems a little bit odd.
If you're asking how one would do that at a technical level, I imagine they would use HTTP Referer info [1]. Essentially they decided if someone was being referred to WSJ.com by a search engine, then show the whole article, else show the paywall.
Re: How Nasty Gal Went from an $85M Company to Bankruptcy
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revenue is often used as a vanity metric. On the other hand... revenue is tangible, profit is an accounting construct.
Would you elaborate? It seems the pile of money you have after paying expenses is tangible in the same way as the pile of money you receive.
Revenue is relatively well defined in accounting terms, although it can be fiddled with some, by booking revenue for sales that aren't going to be completed until later (which, specifically, would be illegal).
Profit is much easier to adjust in accounting terms, by delaying or advancing liabilities from the future. A common example is, if you are going to post a loss for the quarter, go ahead and throw every possible expense you can on it so that next quarter will look much better.
I recommend How to Read a Financial Report by John Tracey.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1118735846/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_111...