In 2. 00. 0, 2. 8- Year- Old Mariam Naficy Sold Her Startup For $1. Million Will History Repeat Itself? Mariam Naficy managed to come out of the dotcom bubble unscathed.
When she was 2. 8, she and her cofounder Varsha Rao sold their online makeup company Eve for $1. Idealab. The deal ended up being a huge mistake for Bill Gross, who outbid LVMH for an 8. Eve only for the company to later fail. She founded Minted, an e- commerce site that sells work from emerging designers, in 2. Yesterday she announced a $5. Series B round of financing.
We asked her what it was like to make so much money at such a young age, and what it's like to be an entrepreneur during both tech bubbles. How did your career begin? Mariam Naficy: I worked for an entrepreneur right before I applied to business school. After business school in 1.
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I lived with Varsha Rao in New York. We were both in investment banking; I was at Goldman Sachs. We totally bonded over the Sunday New York Times and bagel bites. We got along, shared the same work ethic and had the same goals. At age 2. 8, I had no retail experience, no consumer marketing experience and no real Internet experience. But I decided I wanted to work for myself. I felt starting a company would enable me to get the responsibility I deserved and that I couldn't do that within the confines of a bigger company.
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What You Need To Know About Tech. Read Business Insider On The Go. Available on iOS or Android. In 2000, 28-Year-Old Mariam Naficy Sold Her Startup For $110 Million Will History Repeat Itself?
Varsha and I started Eve. We sold it for about $1. The sale was not something we planned, but we started to feel a little bit uneasy about the market. It had just opened one store in New York and LVMH was really concerned about Eve. It thought we were going to move into retail and open up a store. LVMH decided to try and buy us, then turn us into something else.
Idealabs outbid them and bought us instead. You sold Eve for ~$1. MN: Everywhere I went people would explain, in nice ways, why makeup wouldn't sell online. There were two big problems in the industry.
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First, the Lauders controlled half the market so you had to follow the law of distribution from the Lauder brands. Another issue, people felt was, how can you buy something online that you haven't tried? With Eve, we thought we would start a replenishing business.
People would buy brands and products they were already familiar with. Also, the market started changing while we were running Eve. Subscription e- commerce companies, like Shoe.
Dazzle and Birchbox, send users monthly samples to encourage online shopping. I'm not that familiar with what Birchbox is offering but I'd imagine there's a good chance it could succeed if there's personalization involved. What are the similarities between now and then? MN: There are a lot of businesses rising now that may struggle to get the revenue their valuations imply. It's pretty astonishing how much you have to raise your game now to compete in today's entrepreneurial world compared to twelve years ago. People now are a little bit more wary.
BI: What did you do in between Eve and Minted? MN: I took some time off to travel all over the place with my husband but I was always worrying about what I was missing back home. When I returned, I helped 5 Studios launch Movie. Link, a downloadable movie service. Then I went to the Body Shop where I ran its e- commerce division for four years. BI: How did you start Minted and what is it? MN: I started Minted in 2.
The Minted mission is to be a community that supports designers from all over the world and provides them with an opportunity to be discovered and build their careers. The users vote on their designs and tell Minted what to sell. That voting mechanism is pretty competitive and brings the best designs to the top. Most of the designers on Minted . All of the women designers give Minted a very different aesthetic than Threadless; we sell much different types of goods.
I've bought a lot of their t- shirts, but I think our audience is very, very different. BI: Would it be accurate to say Minted is an Etsy meets Threadless? MN: Unlike Etsy, which is all handmade, we print and ship the products, not the designers.
We relieve the designer from having to make and ship everything, package it, and provide customer service. We'll take care of the rest. BI: What's the revenue share? MN: That's also a different model from Etsy's. We pay cash up front for each design in addition to a sales- based revenue share with artists.
We're trying to create a retail distribution for the designer and get them in business and help them build their presence on Minted. We even help some of them launch entire lines on Minted if they win one of our competitions. We're trying to help them get retail distribution they wouldn't get otherwise.
Instead, the top sellers are from small towns and secondary cities in the U. S. Talented people everywhere else do. We don't really see ourselves as a stationery retailer, but as a design on paper goods retailer.
For example, one of the entries we received in a current challenge/competition is a beautiful modern rendition of a family tree. We're also moving into limited edition prints and wall art. BI: How big is Minted?
MN: We're approximately 4. San Francisco. The number of designers we have is in the thousands.
BI: Where do you see Minted in five years? For Minted, my goal is to build it into a favorite design and lifestyle brand for consumers and to provide designers with opportunities that didn't exist before. I see us becoming an iconic design brand in several years. Check out Dwolla's story: This 2. Year- Old's Startup Is Moving $3. Million And Wants To Completely Kill Credit Cards > >.