High-end designer furniture site Made.com plans to float on London’s Main Market with a £100 million funding that would reportedly value the online retailer at around £1 billion.

The company plans to capitalise on the online shift accelerated by the Covid crisis and gobble up share in a fragmented market, although risk-averse investors should note this is a competitive industry where players include e-commerce giant Wayfair and DFS Furniture (DFS), the bricks and mortar rival with well-invested digital channels.

Made.com is currently loss-making and though the company aims to raise new equity in the float, existing investors will also cash out by offloading some shares.

WHAT IS MADE?

Co-founded in 2010 by Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and Li Ning, Julien Callede and Chloe Mcintosh, Made.com sells designer furniture and homeware products across the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, Belgium Spain and the Netherlands via its e-commerce platform.

The London-based company partners with over 150 established and up-and-coming designers, artists and collaborators to create a product range that is popular with UK millennials. MADE is the most reviewed home brand on UK Trustpilot and as the bar chart shows, the retailer benefits from high and rising levels of repeat business.

The stock market hopeful had roughly 1.1 million active customers in 2020 and around 1.2 million active customers in the 12 months to the end of the first quarter of 2021.

IS MADE SITTING PRETTY?

IPO proceeds are earmarked to help Made expand in existing European markets, scale its complementary homeware range and improve service by reducing the lead-times offered to customers. The pandemic accelerated the shift to digital channels and as the Covid crisis recedes, there is a risk growth slows as shoppers elect to log off and instead troop down to a DFS or ScS (SCS).

Yet Made.com’s management insists the furniture and homeware market is ‘at an inflection point of e-commerce adoption, with significant further upside potential given the secular shift to online’.

Structural drivers for Made.com include consolidation of this fragmented market, working from home, the consumer’s increased focus on sustainability and the fact that millennials are entering their ‘core home formation years’.

In terms of the financials, Made.com is highly cash generative and gross sales have grown at an impressive compound annual growth rate of 36% over the last five years. On the negative side of the ledger, the income statement shows pre-tax losses for the last three years despite rising revenue.

Management boasts medium-term ambitions to generate gross sales north of £1.2 billion per year by the end of 2025.

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