We have moved. You will now be redirected to our new site ECF.BUZZ

Sunday, 6 March 2016

Inspiral posts further losses



Inspiral Visionary Products raised £250k on Crowdcube in 2013.

According to the Crowdcube projections, the company would make a net profit of £1.5m for YE October 2014 and a net profit of £3m for YE October 2015. The filed loss for YE March 2015 was £260k, of which £127k was from a write off from their sister company Ekopia, which went into liquidation recently - see here -
http://fantasyequitycrowdfunding.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=+ekopia

Inspiral make a good product and have a goodly number of stockists listed on their website. However they dont seem very good with figures and do not always tell it as it is. The gap above between actual performance and the Crowdcube projections is just one illustration. These projections were never going to be met. They are a pure fantasy used to to gain £250k worth of funding.

In the original pitch they made various comments about likely contracts with M&S and Pret, both of which would have clearly led to much improved sales figures. We dont think these contracts were ever signed. They are not stocked in either now.

In the initial Statement of Affairs for the liquidation of Ekopia dated 27 January 2016, the director of Ekopia (also a founding director of IVP), stated that Ekopia owed IVP £227,527.99 - a very precise and accurate number. According to the accounts just filed for IVP, the debt is in fact only £162,457. You can see this in the Ekopia post above. How is it possible to be so wrong?

So the lesson here has to be the same as most lessons that we post - when it comes to Crowdcube, you really cannot believe any of the information in any of the pitches. Looking back over the IVP pitch there are many instances where they claimed one thing on the forum which has now turned out to be not strictly correct, both about IVP and Ekopia. Future contracts not already signed up should not be used to con people out of their money.  

No comments:

Post a Comment