Entrepreneurs - When Business Relationships Break Down

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) February 15, 2012 -- In 2011 four female students came up with the idea for ClothingCodes.co.uk while studying fashion. As skint students they still wanted the new outfits for every party they went to and found a way to make it happen on a shoe string budget.

Using online voucher codes they found that once they had collected the voucher codes they could then go about finding items of clothing from each store to make up an outfit. This method then turned into an email newsletter which they sent out to over 50 female fashion mad and price conscious students at their University.

As user demand grew the students decided to switch course and make this concept a part of their studies and they wrote a business plan for ClothingCodes.co.uk. But there was a few problems to overcome, including raising seed funding and obtaining the domain they wanted ClothingCodes.co.uk which was owned by a ruthless internet trader.

Then enters Scott Barlow, a local businessman who was passed the business plan for ClothingCodes.co.uk. Scott tells us his thinking after reading the business plan “I had just that week heard of the sale of PromotionalCodes.org.uk in a multi-million pound deal to Internet Brands and was already aware of the huge success of these sites from the likes of Mark Pearson and his MyVoucherCodes empire. I decided there and then to invest”.

Scott went on to invest £3,000 in the business and spent over 4 hours on Skype calls negotiating for the domain ClothingCodes.co.uk – after knocking the trader down from £3,000 to just £900 Scott says the 4 hours was worth it! After outsourcing the website development the business was on target to launch in January 2012 with a soft launch at their University in the November 2011 – which gave very positive feedback.

After the Christmas break Scott fired up his emails one early morning to receive notification that due to a break up in the team between the girls that they could not take part in the business any further. Although Scott owned the IP to the business he was now left with a website and business and no staff to launch or push this forward.

So this is another sad story of companies that never even took off due to founder disputes – the true lesson here though comes from Scott who retained control and ownership making this news better received than it could have been.

Scott is now seeking investor-partners and is also considering an outright sale of ClothingCodes.co.uk as due to his other business commitments he could not launch this alone. Anyone interested in purchasing the business can download a sales document from www.clothingcodes.co.uk

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