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Money makers: When clothes are like chicken
Some people are happy to pay extra for better as Jack Wills founder Pete Williams knows only too well.
Fashion is a lot like chicken, Pete Williams, founder of clothing chain Jack Wills, tells Jim Armitage in the London Evening Standard. You have people who buy cheap Tesco own-brand meat, and those who go for organic. "They basically look and taste the same," he says, "but one is a pound more expensive If you give a s*** about organic, you'll pay a premium and it's worth every penny. If you don't, it's a rip-off and you'll only ever buy it if it's marked down."
Williams' job is to sell the organic chicken of fashion. He tells shoppers in 130 countries the Jack Wills message: no sweatshops, high-quality fabrics, authentic design. "If we can communicate to people what our brand DNA stands for, and they respond to it, they'll buy our stuff," he says. Williams, 43, founded the chain from a store in Salcombe in Devon, selling "preppy clothes to the well-heeled sons and daughters of the shires".
He had dreamed of playing rugby professionally and played for Harlequins into his 20s. But he decided against turning pro due to the constant touring in winter a decision made easier when he broke his thumb during a match. Not that he's looking back. Today, Jack Wills employs more than 2,800 people globally and turns over £130m a year.
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After studying at Oxford, Johnnie Boden spent a miserable few years on Wall Street: "I had no feel for markets. Every share I recommended went bust," he tells Laura Pullman in The Sunday Times. "Then whizzo news he inherited a bundle of dosh from a childless, alcoholic uncle," says Pullman.
Next, Boden tried teaching, but found it didn't pay enough. Then he started a music label, but says "I've never been a druggie person and found that whole world a little scary." In 1991, influenced by American shopping culture, he started the mail order company with 1.5 million customers that bears his name.
Having recently opened Boden's first proper high-street shop in Chelsea, London, Boden would love to do away with "the Boden bible" the catalogue, "all happy families with apple-cheeked children in Cotswold cottages", that is sent out to 60 million people a year at £1 a pop. But customers love it.
Boden is now worth £347m, according to The Sunday Times' Rich List. "People use the adjective greedy' or filthy rich'. But, the fact is, I've created 1,500 jobs, pay loads of tax. I've created a life for lots of people, and it's something to be proud of, really."
How I made a billion from an internet chat room
An idea doesn't have to be new to spawn a billion-dollar business in China, says Emily Feng in the Financial Times. Entrepreneur Zhou Yuan was coming to terms with the failure of his first venture analytics firm Metasearch when he was shown US question-and-answer website, Quora. "Quora felt so inexplicably familiar to me," he says, having nurtured a decade-long ambition to launch something similar in China. "The dots connected."
The next day Zhou rallied two business partners from Metasearch, while an executive from a listed Chinese firm acted as an angel investor. The result was Zhihu, now China's most popular Q&A platform. Three further funding rounds raised $87m, with a further $100m coming from, among others, Chinese internet giant Tencent. Zhihu has had 780 million unique monthly visitors in the past four years and is now worth some $1.25bn.
Yet China has stepped up its policing of such content platforms, says Feng. As Zhihu expands, it must balance fostering lively online discussions with keeping Chinese cyberspace authorities happy. Zhou remains optimistic: "The Chinese internet is really a big market. There is still plenty of experimentation to be done."
The dangerous addictiveness of Facebook
"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," Sean Parker told website Axios last week. He was talking about Facebook, the social network he helped turn into a Goliath of social media. In 2005, Facebook was just five months old when Parker (played by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 foundation story, The Social Network) joined as president. A cocaine scandal drove him out after a year, but Parker was already a billionaire after setting up Napster in 1999, the music file-sharing site feted in the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-growing company of all time.
Now Parker has become "something of a conscientious objector" to social media. "The thought process was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible', and that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while," says Parker.
The "hit" comes in the form of the number of "likes" you get from putting up a post. "It's a social validation feedback loop," he says. "It's exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."
"Like gambling, nicotine, alcohol or heroin, Facebook and Google produce short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long term," claims Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, in USA Today. He says "users fail to recognise the warning signs of addiction". In March, Johnnie Wells, a father in Cornwall, started a petition to get Snapchat to do away with "Snapstreaks", which are accrued by posting at least one image every 24 hours.
They are highly popular with children, and his 14-year-old daughter, Bridget, was "dangerously obsessed" with keeping score. Her best tally was a 620-day streak. But for the moment, Snapchat's priorities appear to lie elsewhere. CEO and founder Evan Spiegel announced a revamp last week, CNBC reports one designed to attract new users and better monetise its feed.
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