Natalie Massenet

"We were taught not to show up unless we had three new trends, so I learned quickly to observe what was going on and to recognise patterns"

"As long as I can remember I have always been thinking about magic in life and how things can be transformed."

"That was defining, I think. I have always felt like a citizen of the world, with a keen sense of what unites us. Had I never moved as a child, maybe I may not have been as entrepreneurial"

"I just never wavered in my belief,” she says. At the start, she adds: “I was a journalist. I had no business experience. But I did have innate people skills.” Her 15 years at Net-A-Porter, she says, “were my MBA. Very early on I realised that nobody was approaching the opportunity to serve consumers remotely and digitally in the way we were"

"We are seeing businesses in areas where consumers have previously been ignored, such as inclusive sizing"

"I came up with the name Imaginary when I left Net-A-Porter and I needed an email address, so I thought I’d better set up an LLC, though I didn’t know what it would be"

"If you could see three disparate indications of something new, and it didn’t matter if you saw it at a dinner party or on a bus, but if you saw three things that all pointed in one direction, you had a trend."

"The consumer wanted something new, but the stores were selling something old."

"And I thought, oh, wouldn’t it be amazing, if you could combine the impulse and the marketing of what was new, and allow the consumer to just click and magically receive something on their doorstep?"