Made.com sees big sales leap ahead of flotation
In private accounts reported by The Daily Telegraph, Made said it saw turnover jump from £26.2 million to £42.8 million in a year. International sales are said to have made up just under a quarter of those revenues.
Made, which won a prize in last year's Techworld Awards, says it connects customers directly with suppliers so that they can buy designer furniture at a significant discount.
The company was founded in 2010 and is still loss-making as it continues to invest in its expansion, a main reason why it needs a stock flotation. The company is led by 33-year-old entrepreneur Ning Li and Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman.
Made.com scooped a gong for retail project of the year at the Techworld Awards for its e-commerce experience project carried out with IT services provider Adapt. Adapt worked with Made to design a dedicated and scalable private cloud infrastructure.
The Made cloud infrastructure includes VMware's hypervisor virtualisation technology, NetApp SAS storage, and SnapMirror data backup. It also uses pairs of Brocade switches and Cisco firewalls to control traffic and protect the cloud platform. The cloud services are provided from two data centres for disaster recovery purposes.