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news
Vulpine cap logos.JPGCycle clothing brand Vulpine is "insolvent" and enters administration
London-based cycle clothing brand Vulpine has entered administration. The news was confirmed in an email send this afternoon by its founder, Nick Hussey, to investors in the business.
He wrote:
It is with intense sadness that I have to inform you that Vulpine is insolvent, and I have had to take the extremely difficult but essential decision to place the company I founded into administration, under UK law, hence my unusual formality.
Two Partners from RSM Restructuring Advisory LLP will be appointed administrators next week, after a special resolution was passed yesterday by ‘A Shareholders’, who are able to vote. Once appointed the Administrators will have full control of the company and I will no longer be able to make any decisions.
We have done all we can to finance the company. The late arrival of the majority of our Spring Summer 2017 stock put us in a more difficult cash position. Thus we sought to raise investment again through crowdfunding. But this did not gain the necessary momentum to complete, likely due to the very poor trading figures of the last financial year.
Thus we pulled out of the Crowdcube attempted raise and began contacting previously interested investors and potential buyers of Vulpine, plus a raft of new contacts.
Whilst there was strong recognition of the brand, and initial verbal interest, none have produced offers or ongoing due diligence, and communication has stopped. It is highly possible that, having seen our precarious financial position and the complications of doing a fast enough deal, they are waiting to pick the business up in administration instead, if any deal is to be done.
Vulpine’s brand and business structure remains relatively undamaged at this point, and any acquisition via administration would see the highest potential value to all stakeholders if conducted as quickly as possible.
The proposed Administrators plan is to try to sell the company’s assets, such as brand, goodwill, database & website to maximize realisations for the benefit of creditors and potentially shareholders.
You can contact Robert Young at RSM for advice on this process, or if you believe there may be an interested buyer: robert.young [at] rsmuk.comI cannot offer financial advice, and I encourage you to seek your own, but if you qualify for EIS status, you should be able to claim significant Loss Relief on top of your Tax Relief.I wish you all the very best.
Ride well.
More to follow.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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253 comments
No, I mean creative more in the sense of what they've done with their brand and positioning - moving away from traditional industry attributes such as performance or artisan-crafted or latest technology. They behave more like a bootstrapped tech startup.
I don't know anything about the quality of their products though; I haven't purchased anything from them.
Their market is above Tesco below Halfords, they are a cut price Planet X. Its no coincidence that's who is backing them, and possibly this Vulpine bid(£50k)
Planet X are a cut price Planet X. Everything is for sale for half the supposed rrp.
Mango are way ahead of most of halfords' range, for what it's worth.
I say this as someone who owns both a Planet X and a Mango bike.
You mean sell a business he was flogging for £7.5m 3 weeks ago for £50,000! I think you are the Internet troll here!
And where the stock was valued at over £250K
That must have taken some tough negotiating.
I see Nick has resurfaced on twitter and is slowly building up the Nick=Victim narrative.
I look forward to his response to my DMs and to other shareholders.
Jenny
TBH after reading all the revelations about the company's true financials, he seems a like a charlatan with no real business acumen. Come up with over-priced niche product, make losses, hide losses, ask for more money. What a business man!
I'd like to think people will think twice about lending him a pencil after all this. The world doesn't need 'visionaries' that end up f@cking people over whilst showing off their bespoke bicycles.
Extremely slow clap for you, Spacer...
Read my full post spacer, apology accepted.
I ride more than once a week and don't mind paying for quality but I'm not getting ripped off.
Yeah, I read it, sadly. It was snidey sixth form shite littered with grammatical errors.
Whereas you're setting this thread alight, Wilde-style...
I agree, where's the update?
Doh!
Nice one F̶i̶x̶i̶e̶ ̶G̶i̶r̶l̶ J̶e̶n̶n̶y̶ Alan
Why wasn't this announced by @Fixie Girl? We need to know.
More great work by @Carlton Reid. More power to you fella!
Unfortunately road.cc only rehash press releases from Vulpine and many others while also posting the odd helmet cam video crash.
Very much doubt we will see any actual investigative journalism on this.
There will be an update when there is something new to say that isn't based on the 'facts' presented by anonymous people in an internet comments section - some of whom would seemingly have an axe to grind with Vulpine and Nick Hussey in particular.
I know, it's unprofessional of us - cos we're all about the clicks here on road.cc.
By now we really should have put together a piece regurgitating all the 'facts' presented here as fact without checking them with the administrator or giving Nick Hussey the chance to put his side of the case, or without really caring what the consequences of doing that would be for the sale of Vulpine itself and the other people - apart from Nick Hussey - whose livelihoods also depended on the company.
Yeah, I'm ashamed our standards really have slipped, but given that lamentable decline you'll just have to wait until we can speak to the administrators (we've been trying). That will probably happen when Vulpine's corporate fate is resolved one way or the other which can't be too far away. At that point too Nick Hussey, who we've also spoken to and who says he's prevented from answering his critics by the terms of the company administration, will presumably be free to put his side of the story which we'll all be very interested to hear I'm sure.
At the end of it all no doubt some people are going to come out of this saga with their actions, motives and judgement called in to question - some of those will be real people, using their real names in the real world and even on the internet too and they'll pay some sort of price. And some may well be fictional internet creations with real people hiding behind them - somewhere - and they won't.
Thank you for the update, Tony. I don't think anyone (well, most people
) were criticising road.cc's professionalism. It's just a little frustrating when a (relatively) big story like this one explodes and then just goes utterly, completely silent (except for the echo chamber below the line).
(Could we just have a new story maybe saying that Mr Hussey has said he's not allowed to comment, etc, just so we can finally retire this article and its associated 20MB of comments...?)
Right now, even "no comment" is a valuable quote - particularly to on a website where so many readers appear to have appointed themselves editor. (I am a real editor - not here though - by the way).
But your response is appreciated, and good enough for now
Fixie Girl for Road.cc president!
If the distribution of voting shares given in the CS01 from Apr. '17, applies back to May '16, the total number of votes was: (5764788+860000+1000000) = 7624788. Hussey held 1000000+860000+90090 = 1950090 votes. Hussey held 25% of the votes, because - even though the /value/ of his "ordinary founder" and "ordinary subscriber" shares (1 million and 860,000) was quite low at 0.0001p relative to the other classes of shares (10p) each - his shares had disproportionate voting rights relative to their value.
Of the directors who resigned in '16 with voting shares, Matthews, Beaumont, the Georgiades family, they held 1,545,100 votes versus Hussey's 1,950,090. Though, one wonders if they could have gotten or tried to get some of the other major voting shareholders involved? E.g. of the former directors alone: Jenks with 1,080,000 (and prob. another 219,37 judging by names) or Simon Hulme (568570, maybe another 180180 if the other Hulme is related).
Be interesting to have a drink with one or two of them...
I have a story to tell.
Imagine an exciting new entrant to the cycling clothing market. A company disproportionally feted by the cycling press who reaches it's 3rd year in a dire cash flow position. It borrows £200k at the end of March 2015 which soon gets swallowed up so 6 months later they try for £500k from a popular crowd funding site.
The offering looked very attractive and days later raised just over £1m. Key to the success was the valuation of £6m, profitability and with a few months left of the financial year a relatively small loss of just over £200k.
With all that money on hand to drive their marketing team growth was surely guaranteed. Add to that the recent tie up with famous sportsman and an exclusive with a major UK retailer sales were in the bag.
Well fast forward 12 month and something just doesnt make sense.
1. In 2016 the marketing spend was 12% less in £ than 2015
2. Sales plummeted by over 30% yoy
3. Losses were almost £800k
4. Development costs were just £20k for a company priding itself on innovation.
One area of growth does stand out. A 100% rise in salaries to over £500k. Shared between 7 employees if one takes the 2016 prospectus figure. Oh and yes, remember this is a start up in its 4th year of trading.
Right I'm off for a ride to calm down.
There's a movie in all this.
@Fixie girl "A company disproportionally feted by the cycling press" this is what I always felt as well never could understand why. Road.cc were certainly taken in - and sounds like at least one of the staff had shares in the company. Probably makes sense now.
get to know Nick;
http://cyclelove.cc/2012/12/at-home-with-vulpines-nick-hussey/
I invested in the low 5 figures, but I knew it was a gamble and was prepared to lose it - I assume it's gone but its no big deal to me. Ony an idiot would have invested anything they couldn't afford to lose in that proposition - it was a hot mess, but a beautiful idea.
Nick is a really engaging chap and is passionate about cycling - I invested in him rather than the numbers. I wish him well in the future. Nothing but love from me.
There seems to be much more to this story than is at first obvious. I has no realised that the Hoy deal was over for example. A pity as the Hoy clothing was excellent. I said previously that I liked there stuff and have bought some of it, but I have to say that the decisions taken in the direction new clothing lines took seemed odd to me. Driving the prices up into niche areas and getting rid of decent items from previous ranges. The thermaloft jacket they did was brilliant, but removed from the product line for example. I guess it shows the pretentions of wanting to be a fashion brand with ever changing seasonal products, but even Rapha just twiddles with the colours and leaves the basic product as is. Yes launch one or two new things, but build up the sale of a mainstay of items... at the start I was interested in almost all of the products, but the end there were less that interested me. Maybe it was because I'd already bought the items that Did!
That's Kadinkski - no thread is complete with his loadsamoney input, bless him.
First para - valid. Could've been summed up as 'caveat emptor'.
Second para - bollocks. 'Investing' in a duplicitous salad, no matter how engaging, won't maintain the lifestyle K is so obviously accustomed to.
I remember filling in a survey and said that the Hoy branding didn't mean much to me and then shortly after it vanished, assumed the remainder of the responses were similar.... As if to represent the whole affair all the logos on my Hoy shorts have started peeling off. Don't suppose I'll try and get a refund...
Guys, road.cc is an advertising clickbait site for cycling products.
You won't find any reporters, investigative journalists or pullitzer prize winners here. They put out 'reviews' and rider v motorist culture war youtube videos. That's it. Regurgitate some guide every season.
It has a comments section so some of us can make the day go in a bit faster by calling each other names over petty issues.
It is what it is. No point asking where the proper journalism is on such and such
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If Road.cc was a film, it would be 'faces of death' or 'mondo cane'
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