Vulpine Clothing

It turns out that the director of Vulpine was helping himself to a salary of over £90k pa at the same time as running a start up business, using shareholders money, rapidly into the ground.

lol

Has anyone got the text of the Sunday Times article?

When it raised more than £1m on crowdfunding platform Crowdcube in October 2015, Vulpine Performance seemed to have the wind behind it. The cycling clothing brand had shot glossy promotional films in Italy and Norway, struck a collaboration with the Olympic gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy and said it was on course to break even.

Less than two years later, it is about to collapse. Two partners from accountancy firm RSM are due to be appointed administrators tomorrow, with the likelihood of losses for about 600 shareholders, including several well-known angel investors. It has prompted one early backer to describe crowdfunding websites as “a ticking timebomb”.

Vulpine was set up by Nick Hussey, a former film maker, in 2010. A keen amateur cyclist, he said he wanted to escape the “snobbery” of the professional sport and create a brand that would appeal to casual riders.

Over the next few years he raised £1.1m in seed funding from backers including Philip Jenks, a founder of the publisher Harriman House, and Simon Hulme, a serial investor in start-ups. Several people who put in money said that Hussey, now 43, was enthusiastic and persuasive.

An investment banker said: “Everyone bought the cycling thing and everyone got that it was a lifestyle brand with a trendy look — you get off the bike and go into the pub.”

However, according to several early backers, Hussey insisted on spending large sums of money on marketing and refused to rein that in when challenged. Vulpine also struggled with retail basics, they said, often ordering large amounts of stock and then being forced to discount it aggressively, eroding the brand’s desirability. There were also some problems with late deliveries from Chinese factories, they added. Hussey said: “I am unable to comment during the administration process.”

Jenks and Hulme resigned from the board in frustration in 2015, followed by several other independent directors. In October 2015, Hussey turned to Crowdcube with the aim of raising £500,000. Although at the time he said it was an opportunity for fans to invest, a source said Hussey had “exhausted” his existing investor base.

Vulpine had announced its deal with Hoy earlier that year, and demand was so strong it raised £1m in a week, with at least one investor putting in £50,000. The fundraising valued it at £5m.

Vulpine burned through the money and failed to hit its sales targets. It remained loss making and tried to raise a further £750,000, at a £7.5m valuation, last month. This time it failed and was forced to call in administrators.

Hulme said: “Vulpine had failed abysmally to deliver what it had promised investors in the first round. To me, crowdfunding looks like a ticking timebomb.”

Crowdcube said it had complied with regulations and that, “whilst the failure of any business is disappointing, equity crowdfunding investments are high-risk and unfortunately not all businesses will provide an exit for shareholders.

Is it too late to retract my comment about 'integrity'?

Yeesh.

Founders pulling large amounts of cash out of the business sadly is all too common - not that that excuses anything.

Thanks for posting

If you can stand to go to road.cc, there's a bunch of comment/allegation/info in the comments section. http://road.cc/content/news/222147-cycle-clothing-brand-vulpine-insolvent-and-enters-administration#comments

I've been a critic of Vulpine's business model for a while, without knowing all the shit that's now coming out - I'd just thought the clothes were not up to much, too expensive and the whole regular discounting was insane. That the founder thought it a good idea to draw a huge salary from a loss making business really jars with the message he's always shouted about passion and integrity - but does hark back to the criticisms he made about the film industry on exiting it. You'd think he wouldn't want to shaft his own business in the same way he felt shafted by the film industry, but there we go.

It's sad for the industry as a whole - Vulpine were/are, for better or worse, one of the highest profile British brands. They'd garnered national press, with Nick managing to get his face on the telly and in several of the papers as the head of a business that was going places and doing amazing things off the back of this exciting uplift in people cycling.
With this high profile and pretty dodgy fundraising strategy - and I say dodgy because the business was already in big trouble in 2015 during the initial crowdfund, and then was literally on the verge of administration this year during the second crowdfund attempt - it will tarnish so many other smaller brands looking for honest startup capital. As we all know, cyclists get tarred with the same brush... I wonder if it'll be the same for cycling businesses?

passion and integrity

strong and stable

That blog post is famous. For all the wrong reasons...

I just hope that Gav at August Bicycles got paid for those two bikes he built for Nick and his wife as hugely indulgent gifts for themselves. I see they have removed them from the Vulpine website, so guessing they wont be giving them up as assets of the company.

Seems like this Nick fella has fucked over a lot of people in the indusrty with all this crowdfunding when the company was obviously on its way under. I really hope his actions dont leave any other small business in finacial trouble themsleves, as that would be a real tragedy, wheras Vulpine dissapearing off the map is no real loss to the UK cycling industry IMHO.

It sounds like a case study in wrongful trading
http://www.companyrescue.co.uk/directors-guides-insolvency/wrongful-trading

Hey Rob!
Thankfully, we (August Bicycles), were paid in full, as we are so careful to not let anything leave the workshop until it has been paid for. You just have to be like that, as a small set up! It could have crippled us to not get paid for them.

The prices of the bikes themselves made a few people's eyes water, but these were heavily inflated by Vulpine, against our advice, and now that everything has come out, we simply don't feel as though we can promote the builds on our website, which is such a shame, as they really were beautiful.

A good friend of ours, who we put forward for some work with Vulpine, hasn't and probably won't get paid, which makes us feel awful and this whole thing has really tarnished what seemed like a terrific chance to build some lovely bikes. We must be pretty blinkered to have not known something was brewing! The bikes themselves have actually been seized now, as assets, so Gavin's efforts were pretty much all for nothing now, which makes me so sad.

But hey, there might be a couple of sweet bikes being auctioned off soon, if anyone wants to get a bargain! Haha.

Amy (Mrs. August)

.

Sadly not surprised by this, as many have said the warning signs seem to have been there for a while. The sheer amount of time he spent on Twitter was always a huge red flag for me: you just can't run a business properly while being on Twitter that much - over 75,000 tweets(!), now protected. Seemed more interested in the comms stuff than the business itself.

Before being removed from the website the August bikes had been reduced from £5.5k to £3.3k so prospective buyers obviously thought they were overpriced too...

@Fox Exactly! Even that was an issue as we never actually agreed to offering a run of those bikes! The same bikes, in a customer's choice of colour, without the Vulpine details, would be much less anyway! That price reduction was offered as part of the blanket 30% off on the site, which we had no idea about either!

I feel so awful that Gavin actually built them now!

Jesus, Vulpine tried to price inflate your bikes? I'm amazed they didn't offer them for £6k one week then drop them down to £2k for the next month actually. That would be more in line with their strategy of late...
Really sad to hear your friend got shafted. That's not nice at all.

Oh shit I said that in jest, didn't actually realise they DID discount them! FUCK.

@bashthebox Yup! They DID inflate them. They tried to do it even more but I had to step in and say it was ridiculous! They'd be pricing Gav right out of the market. Our friend did a whole lot of photography for them, all of which is incredible, and is now one of many creditors doomed to be out of pocket. He's just bought a house too, so that unpaid invoice is having a huge knock-on effect! We've kept hold of one of the wheels for the men's bike, as we hoped that would be leverage to get our friend paid, but nope!

hahaha! Yes, reduced without a word of warning!

Even that was an issue as we never actually agreed to offering a run of those bikes!

Sadly I'm not surprised.

That's utterly insane. Did you get the feeling he was a fantasist when working with him?

You're right, it's a terrible thing to inflate your prices that much. I must admit that your collab was the first I'd heard of your brand - so I'd just assumed that was the normal price for your bikes. I'm not in the market for anything handbuilt right now, but if I was, I'd certainly have blenched at the price... so I really hope this hasn't damaged you by putting off potential customers who assume you're too expensive.

Btw, Fixie Girl on the comments on road.cc has seen the administrators documents and said she couldn't see the bikes listed as assets.

@bashthebox We're pretty lucky in that Gavin's got a nice order book on the go and a lot of people got in touch to ask if we had been paid and what the hell was going on with those prices! We certainly aren't the sort to win a few awards at Bespoked and then tack a few grand on our prices as a result, so all good really.

Honestly? Something didn't feel right, which is why I instigated some marshall law in terms of getting paid etc. There was just so much going on. Flurries of texts, emails etc and always with new ideas, wants and demands, not to mention promises. It all felt a little...what's the word...uneasy. The depth of the issues have still staggered us though, despite being warned by a couple of industry colleagues that we should tread a little carefully!

@Sumo Really?? Interesting. I'd love to see how much they apparently cost them though! Good grief, when will all the deception end? It's the shareholders I feel really rotten for and all the creditors.

Interesting comments.

For all the snobbery on LFGSS against Vulpine for not being Rapha, they did make some pieces that worked well, alongside a lot of other misses and near-misses that were just a bit meh. I've picked up some things from them over the years and generally have found it to be pretty solid, hard-wearing stuff that works well for the desired objective of cycling around in casual clothes without needing to get changed at my destination.

But the prices were always massively toppy - I never bought anything full price. But then, I've never bought anything from Rapha full price either - their prices are pretty toppy also.

And Rapha also has some bizarre products whose very existence I can't fathom. Designer leather Paul Smith collab 'town gloves' for £300, anyone? Or perhaps some Rapha-branded Bang & Olufson headphones at a 33pc markup on the regular price?

None of this is to excuse poor management or poor use of shareholders' funds. It's just the snobbery against the brand for not being Rapha is something I've never really understood.