Julia Elliot Brown's Upper St Liquidation

I have to start by confessing a very considerable dislike for Julia Elliot Brown and all those like her. Her Upper Street company liquidation reveals a trail of debts of almost £500k after the collapse of her Seedrs ECF funded shambles. It's best summed up by the liquidator who stated that he couldnt give the remaining stock away, let alone sell it.

Now there is nothing wrong with a failure, or two even. In fact you can learn far more from them than success. But to fail with such large debts and then promote yourself, as she has, as a guru of small business and start ups, whilst the corpse is still wriggling towards its final resting place, is just a little too much. And yes, you guessed it, she is in our space, promoting herself as someone to make your equity crowdfunding campaign a success. Clearly not for the right reasons!  Who needs Julia Elliot Brown when we have Seedrs and Crowdcube screwing up the sector already.

Upper Street does Equity Crowdfunding no favours

A recent article in The Times  - http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shoemaker-was-on-last-legs-but-crowdfund-investors-were-in-dark-3z5tn9zfz which we helped piece together, follows a number of posts we have here on this company.

It seems wholly unbelievable that Seedrs knew the real situation when they allowed the second pitch. The CEO of Upper Street, Julia Elliot Brown,  has a proven track record of being less than straight with her facts. Evidenced very clearly by her selfie as a successful business woman who now helps other companies go bust. How she can claim that she successfully exited Upper Street is incredible.

What we actually said to the Times was '' 'It seems pretty clear that when Upper Street came back for a second time, the company was in considerable financial difficulty. This is certainly not how the pitch portrayed it. The company was valued at £3.2m in October 2015 but by halfway through this month the company was to be worth just £12k. That anomaly is difficult to understand. Investors and indeed Seedrs might well ask why they were not told of the company's real situation.'' 

The important difference is that The Times left out the reference to Seedrs not being fully up to speed on what was happening.

Equity Crowdfunding needs a few changes, one of which is recommended at the end of the article. But this is not a major change and will not really make much difference. It's playing around on the margins

What we really need is a system whereby companies wanting to use ECF have to have audited accounts for the previous year including a full P&L and then must use full accounts reporting, for 3 years after they have raised their money. 

In the case of Upper Street this would have helped prevent this mess. 

Platforms must also be held liable for this type of failure - where there is very clear evidence that the pitch, for whatever reason, did not reflect the true state of affairs.

Seedrs is one of the better platforms so this is a very disappointing outcome. You would expect and indeed do constantly find this type of situation with Crowdcube pitches but not on Seedrs. 

These shoes were made for walking - Seedrs pitch fails

Firstly thanks to Gordon Gekko who drew our attention to this - before it was listed at CH!

Upper St have raised ECf on Seedrs but have now decided to close. See here https://www.shoesofprey.com/articles/3179929246/upperstreet.

Investors included The British Business Bank and Venrex Partners and before the Seedrs raise the business was valued at £2.8m.

They have sold their assets to the Australian company Shoes of Prey, who seem delighted. Apparently the founders of Upper St decided it was time to do something else.

Not too sure how delighted the investors in Upper St will be.

It seems these shoes really did walk all over you.