Small Town Girl With Big Ambitions
Deirdre McGettrick tells Arlene Harris why she ditched her career in banking to get her feet under the table of online furniture sales — and how she raised £5m in funding
Growing up in the small town of Ballymote in Co. Sligo, Deirdre McGettrick enjoyed nothing more than imagining what her future home would look like as she spent hours poring over Argos catalogues and newspaper property sections.
Inspired by the merchandise in her father’s curtain and blind shop, she spent a lot of time accompanying him to trade shows to look at fabrics and styles. Although she had high aspirations for designing the perfect property, she never imagined that a couple of decades later she would be raising millions in risk capital for a furniture and homewares website.
Having studied law in Ireland before moving to London to start her career, the former investment banker recalls the lightbulb moment which inspired Ufurnish.com, which styles itself as the UK’s number one search and discovery platform for home furniture and furnishings.
“I spent eight months in London doing an internship with JP Morgan as part of my degree, and after going back to Ireland to finish it I started working in a law firm,” McGettrick recalls. “I missed the buzz of London and the financial world, so I returned to England. I spent a decade working in finance and loved my job. During this time, I became frustrated when looking for pieces to furnish my apartment as there was no easy way to shop for all the products in one place.
“We had Skyscanner for travel, with Booking.com for hotels, and Daft for property but nothing for interiors. Although I never thought I would start my own business, this inspired the idea. I had a choice to either stay in banking and try to work my way up or start a
business in a sector that I was most passionate about.”
McGettrick (35) had joined BNP Paribas in 2011 before moving on to HSBC in 2015. She worked in the bank’s leveraged and acquisition finance team which arranged bond finance for Reckitt Benckiser, BAT, Premier Foods, Ocado, House of Fraser and others. McGettrick had got to the stage where she was originating deals but she decided that she just had to scratch the start-up itch.
“I didn’t have a big mortgage or kids in private school. I had lots of great skills and it was the best time to follow my passion and try to provide a solution for the thousands of women like myself who wanted to search for furniture in a better way.”
Making the decision to leave was easier than putting her plans into
action. With her husband and cofounder, Ray Wright, the pair decided that he would leave his job first and she would stay until the prototype was off the ground and some form of funding had been secured.
“We self-built the first version of Ufurnish.com and I remember being in work one day when Ray rang to say that someone had just bought something,” she says. “This was exciting but the next step was to get an agency to build the website and try to sign up some retailers. This involved trying to convince retailers to let us have their data and product listings to build the demo. We got a few on board and were able to launch with five retailers.”
Ufurnish is not a retailer itself. It is an aggregator of information relating to furniture and beds, bedding, curtains, blinds, rugs, ornaments, home fragrance, clocks, cushions, throws, garden furniture, mirrors, storage and just about anything else that is home-related.
Ufurnish collates thousands of goods for sale online under different categories and displays links to the retailers’ websites. If the Ufurnish browser makes a purchase through the link, then Unfurnish receives a commission from the vendor.
In terms of convenience, Ufurnish is a fantastic resource for online shoppers. Its viability will depend on the number of click-throughs, and to garner those clicks requires agreeing partnerships with multiple retailers, sophisticated back-end tech, top-class presentation at the front-end, and getting the word out to consumers that the facility exists.
The founders funded the business initially by tapping family, friends and colleagues in 2020 for c. £1.8m, a process that took nine months. Ufurnish availed of the UK’s Enterprise Investment Scheme, which offers 30% income tax relief on investments up to £1m per tax year.
Any gain is free of Capital Gains Tax if the investment is held for at least three years, and if the shares are sold at a loss the taxpayer can elect to set that loss against income tax. In the 2021/22 tax year, 4,480 UK companies raised a total of £2,305m of funds under the EIS scheme.
Angel investors at Ufurnish included Smurfit Kappa CEO Tony Smurfit and Dalata Hotels founder Pat McCann. McGettrick met McCann at a networking event during her banking days and stayed in touch. “When I had the business idea I asked Pat if he would meet for coffee and share some advice,” she recalls. “He invested in the business and when he stepped down from Dalata I was delighted when he agreed to chair our company.”
‘I would rather try and fail than not try at all’