← Back to the club

Made.com

E-commerce / furnitureUK
New to Unitard
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $1.05 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
  1. 🦄
    Became a unicorn
    2021
  2. 📈
    Peak valuation
    $1.05 Billion ’21
  3. 💔
    Became a Unitard
    Nov 2022
  4. 💸
    Last valuation
    Wiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$270M
Total raised
$58.2K/day
Burned · 12.7y alive
Funding: Wikipedia / CNBC / TechCrunch
Current status
Entered administration Nov 2022; brand, domains and IP sold to Next for £3.4M.

The rise & fall

6 moments · 2010–2022

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

Mar 2010
Founded in London
Ning Li and Brent Hoberman connect shoppers directly with furniture designers and manufacturers — no warehouses, no middlemen.
Wikipedia
Jun 2021
The peak: a £775M London float$1.05B
Eleven years of direct-from-designer sofas culminate in an LSE debut worth about $1.05B.
TechCrunch
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021–22
Glassdoor reviews traced the drift from inside: a stark London-versus-Ipswich divide, with call-centre staff recounting a revolving door of agents and unreachable bonus targets — and, when the cuts came, exit packages reviewers felt were badly handled.
2022
Freight bills up, sofa orders down
Surging shipping costs, inflation and collapsing demand for big-ticket items gut the business in one of the UK's fastest corporate unwinds.
New Statesman
Nov 2022
Administration — joins the Unitard Club 💔
Seventeen months after the float, Made.com calls in administrators and shareholders are wiped out.
TechCrunch
Nov 2022
Next buys the name for £3.4M
The brand, domains and IP fetch about 0.4% of the float valuation; roughly $270M of venture money is gone.
Irish Times
$1.05Bof peak value erased · 13 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Made.com was a London-based online furniture retailer that connected shoppers directly with designers and manufacturers, cutting out warehousing. It floated in London in June 2021 at about £775M (~$1B); surging freight costs, inflation and collapsing demand for big-ticket items then gutted it in one of the UK's fastest corporate unwinds. It entered administration in November 2022, and Next bought only its brand and IP for £3.4M — wiping out shareholders.

Source: TechCrunch / Irish Times / New Statesman (£775M / ~$1.05B LSE IPO June 2021; administration Nov 2022; brand + IP sold to Next for £3.4M)

Where they went

  • Nicola Thompson
    CEO (2022, at administration)
    Chief Executive Officer at TentBox
    LinkedIn ↗
  • Ning Li
    co-founder & CEO (the idea came from a £3,000 sofa his friend's factory was paid £250 to make)
    Founder at Typology
    LinkedIn ↗
  • Brent Hoberman
    co-founder & chairman (had already co-founded lastminute.com)
    Co-Founder and Executive Chair at Founders Forum
    LinkedIn ↗
  • Julien Callède
    co-founder & COO
    Co-Founder & Chairman at Eclo Beauty
    LinkedIn ↗
  • Chloe Macintosh
    co-founder & creative director (stepped down in 2015)
    Founder and CEO at Kama
    LinkedIn ↗

Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-21. See our methodology.

More from the club

Same sector · E-commerce / furniture
Home24$1.1B
Same fate · administration
Cazoo$8BPowa Technologies$2.7BInfarm$1BBritishvolt$1BBulb Energy$1B
🦄