SHOCKER!! Crowdcube outdo themselves with collapse of Myshowcase.

We can hardly believe this story. Just 12 months after raising £1m from Crowdcube investors, Myshowcase is closing down.

Here's how Crowdcube promoted the business in January 2017 -

• Experienced team with proven track record of business exits
• Over £2.75m equity raised to date, investors include 24Haymarket
• Named one of The Sunday Times’ Top 15 fastest growing startups in 2015
• #2 best online beauty retailer by The Independent, 2014

Crowdcube included them in their list of alumni who have cracked the £1m raise ceiling just two weeks ago! Looks like this has now fallen in ...............

https://www.crowdcube.com/explore/2017/12/18/the-1m-club-where-are-they-now

The CEO Nancy Cruikshank (typo?), can be seen and heard allover the internet in her role as the ultimate guru for female entrepreneurs. Lets hope most of then do not take after you Nancy.

Here is the final email sent to investors -

Regrettably, we announce that MyShowcase will close at the end of January 2018. MyShowcase is solvent so we will be able to pay everybody and will leave no debts at all upon closure.

Since we took our first order on May 29, 2012, over 47,000 customers have benefitted from our personalised beauty shopping service. Over the years we have been recognised by our peers for our innovation and achievements, including being voted the #2 best online beauty retailer in 2014 by The Independent, listed in The Sunday Times' Top 15 Start-Up Fast Track 2015 and winning the 2016 Excellence ("best company") Award from the UK Direct Sales Association. In 2017 we successfully launched the Genie, an online personalised beauty service and Beauty Elite, the best beauty loyalty programme in the UK.

Despite all this, we have been unable to achieve the necessary growth to build a profitable and therefore, sustainable business. We have been unable to raise additional funds to develop a direct to consumer business, to complement our Stylist business.

We are all very sad but we are also proud of what we have achieved, together. We would like to very sincerely thank our loyal customers, our hard-working Stylists, our wonderful Brand Partners, our devoted HQ team and our supportive investors. We couldn't have achieved so much and come this far without all of you. We wish we could have gone further, but time is not on our side.

All three of MyShowcase's Founders have invested money into MyShowcase and nearly 6 years of our lives. We fought hard to make MyShowcase a success. We are sincerely sorry that we must now agree with our Board that it's time to close the business, as it is neither profitable and sustainable or able to raise a further round of funding to go forward. If you have any questions, please feel free to email Nancy, CEO, at nancy@myshowcase.com.

With a heavy heart,
Nancy, Rodrigo & Olivier
Founders

Our Conclusion - maybe a con or maybe the management were/are complete air heads or this CC round was a last desperate attempt (we have seen this before) but no one told investors that. Not possible otherwise. Not clear if the 'no debts' statement includes you CC investors - seems unlikely though as if they had that sort of spare cash (£4m total equity finance) why would they be giving up. Nice to know your support is so valued.

We were just putting together a rather long and sorry list of all the Crowdcube funded companies with recent accounts who have failed to get close to their projections, when this bombshell landed. List on the way shortly. 

As if this farce wasnt enough, Crowdcube have yet again been caught with their pants down. They claimed to have raised over £1m for Myshowcase but the filings at CH show that the CC nominee account is for just £280k not £1m. Come on FCA, you must do something to stop these bandits.