Ning Li was in his mid-twenties and working as an investment banker when a sofa changed his life. Not a grand dream, just the plain irritation of trying to buy one. Years later he would tell interviewers that this small, annoying errand was where Made.com began.
That is the quiet fact behind a company that once carried a £775 million price tag. Li was not a furniture man. He was a young finance graduate who noticed that a sofa in a shop cost far more than the wood, foam and fabric inside it. Sofas, he decided, were being sold by the wrong people in the wrong buildings.
What almost nobody outside the company remembers is that Li did not stay to see the end.
Before Made, he co-founded MyFab.com in Paris. It was an earlier attempt at the same itch: design for people who could not afford a showroom. What came next depended on a conversation. Brent Hoberman, who had built lastminute.com, told Li to settle in the UK, where he would help him launch a new business idea. Li has said that was the boost he needed. In 2010, with £2.5 million, Made.com opened its virtual doors, with Julien Callède and Chloe Macintosh as co-founders.
The model was clever. Show a design online. Collect orders. Only then ask the factory to build it. No stockrooms full of unsold chairs. Funding followed: £6 million in 2012, £38 million in 2015, £40 million in 2018. Li even joined David Cameron's 2013 trade mission to China.
What almost nobody outside the company remembers is that Li did not stay to see the end. He had left as CEO long before the crash, and in October 2022 he publicly accused the bosses who followed of losing focus as the business teetered.
The floatation in June 2021 was the peak. The company listed at £775 million and posted £371 million in sales. But the model that avoided stock also meant customers waited. Shipping delays stretched for months. Freight costs soared. Losses more than doubled to £31.4 million. In February 2022 the CEO stepped down, citing family reasons. Sales fell. Talks with a buyer failed. In October it stopped taking orders. On 9 November 2022 Made.com went into administration, and about 500 people lost their jobs. Next bought the name and the website, not the staff, and relaunched it in August 2023.
The lesson for a young founder is uncomfortable. A clean idea born from a personal annoyance can raise a fortune, but a promise to the customer, here a delivery date, is the real product. When the promise breaks, no clever model can save it. And a founder who has left still watches what happens to the thing they named.