Several years ago the business school graduate had moved to San Francisco to mint her first fortune in the technology sector, then fresh out of university. The Silicon Valley city is home to a plethora of tech businesses and Sherry wasted no time in bombarding her way into the offices of AT&T, the US-listed telecoms giant.
“I put my suit on, I got through security, I got into an elevator and I did a proper elevator pitch,” says Sherry, a graduate of the Executive MBA at the Kellogg School of Management. The ambitious entrepreneur was not turned away. “They hired me. [Straight] out of university, I had this great corporate job,” she says.
She would spend the next decade in management and board-level positions at a number of tech companies. But now she is a start-up founder, working out of London where her business sells luxury home furniture through an online interior decoration magazine.
Founded in 2012, The Longest Stay has grown from a tech minnow with 200 products to a bustling virtual marketplace with 250 brands including Cassina, a leading Italian luxury manufacturer, which collectively sell more than 3,000 products online, she says.
Just three years in business, it is no Net-a-Porter, but the way the venture mixes editorial, social networking and high-end home interior fashion would interest any business trying to harness the power of the web.
E-commerce has taken the retail market by storm and has opened up opportunity for upstarts like Sherry to marry technological expertise with luxury products.
The luxury industry has shown signs of slowing global growth, but a three-dimensional sales channel is providing a touch of innovation that has resonated with younger consumers. Online luxury sales are growing twice as fast as the overall market, influencing 28% of all luxury sales in 2013, according to data compiled by McKinsey & Company, the consultancy.
Many of the new luxury and fashion entrants blend commerce with tech and social networks, and they are also often founded by women only slightly older than the customers they target.
Data from venture capital and private equity research firm PitchBook show that 40% of e-commerce companies that won VC-backing in the US last year were founded or co-founded by a woman. That’s up from less than 20% in 2009.
But what makes The Longest Stay unique is editorial. The company is the UK’s first click-and-buy interiors magazine. “It’s all about create[ing] a home so beautiful [that] you never want to leave,” says Sherry. She’s an energetic and passionate speaker, full of tall entrepreneur’s tales.
Like a growing number of EMBAs – she also studied at Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Management in Germany – she has turned to start-up life after a lengthy corporate career.
Sherry pulls up a photograph of her magazine’s front cover. Addressing a crowd at the Entrepreneur Country Forum, an annual start-up extravaganza organized by investment group Ariadne Capital, she enthuses at her creative content.
“Coming from tech and not having any [luxury] background, I styled this whole shoot,” she says. “I choose the models, the fabrics, the clothes, the pieces. Everything.”
Sherry comes from tech but her career has had many twists and turns. The American, who identifies herself as European in spirit, moved to Arcor, the fixed phone line business of a subsidiary of Vodafone, after two years as an account manager at AT&T. The tech theme continued when she landed a board-level position at Lycos UK, the internet platform, as its director of mobile.
Her final corporate act was with Symbian, a brand of smartphones once used by Nokia, the Finnish communications business, where she was a director for four years. “I spent a good part of my life doing the corporate tech business development, trying to change the world with technology,” Sherry says.
But her late husband, whom she met at a tech conference in France, convinced her to follow an entrepreneurial career path that had been shaping up for much of her life. One of Sherry’s early ventures was a travel business she ran from her university dorm room, she says.
It is fitting that The Longest Stay evolved from a luxury hotel that the female founder designed whilst living in Rome (her husband was Italian). She purchased a building fit for purpose and had ambitions to sell luxury furniture placed around the hotel to guests, but soon realized a lack of hospitality experience would hamper growth.
Business education would give her the experience she needed. Sherry enrolled in Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne, a leading hospitality school in Switzerland, but her initial business idea quickly evolved.
When the Swiss institute gave her a group of students to assess the plan, they centred on the idea of selling products through home decoration magazines – after a lengthy two years’ research phase. “I’m a perfectionist,” laughs Sherry.
Her tech background came into play here. Shewas able to build a mobile application and get luxury brands online, many for the first time, while developing the online magazine.
But disaster struck during the company’s launch phase in London, where the venture is based, when her husband sadly passed away. Her newly-recruited team, sourced through social network LinkedIn, had to executive her vision on her behalf. “I need[ed] some time,” she says.
Yet tragedy did not halt progress. The website went live a few months’ later. “It was a real success,” Sherry smiles. It’s crucial that you have a solid team in place, she adds. “We all can imagine [that] every day is going to be pure sunshine, but if something happens unexpectedly, make sure they’ve got your back.”
She has had to overcome a great many challenges but the start-up founder attributes her success to developing a flawless business plan while at university.
“[When] you’ve hit your USP, you’ve got your safe zone,” says Sherry. “I was always sure that the world was going to be hyper-competitive. [But] I just wanted to make sure that I had the perfect, perfect concept,” she says.
The Longest Stay is being hailed as the next big destination for discerning shoppers and design lovers. But the e-commerce market is saturated, she adds. “Everyone’s online."
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