With Internet shopping now accounting for 6% of all UK retail and growing at a faster rate than bricks-and-mortar retailing, I believe that now would be an ideal time to start an internet based business. (www. imrg. org, 2003) There is also the fact that the start of this year saw a series of success cases within the ‘dot com’ industry. These cases included:

“Four Nottingham Trent University graduates, Peter Atalla, 21, Michael Haycock, 23, John Woodcock, 22, and Alan Edmondson, 22, sold their information website for students to a media organisation, International Media Products Group, for i?? 10 million. ” (proquest. umi. com, 2003) Baring these factors in mind, this report has been compiled in order to outline my proposal for setting up my own Internet Company. It will address issues that surround this subject and justify my choices.

Proposal My proposal for a new e-business is ‘Blue Chimp Clothing’, a company that sells fresh new fashionable t-shirts over the Internet. The main difference with this company though is that new and up-coming artists who may have an interest in going into fashion design will produce the designs for the t-shirts. To obtain these designs the artists will have to either post or e-mail their ideas to us where the successful ones will be selected and printed onto the t-shirts.

There will be a limited number of t-shirts with each design printed as to hopefully increase the demand for each. To attract the interest of the artists, for each t-shirt with their design that is sold they will receive a percentage of the profit made on that item. I feel that this will be successful not only because of the increase in consumer spending within e-commerce, but also because of the number of young, inspired designers in this country that are currently seeking employment.

“Keen competition is expected for most jobs, despite projected faster-than-average employment growth, because many talented individuals are attracted to careers as designers. ” (www. bls. gov, 2003) As ‘Blue Chimp Clothing’ will be both producing and selling the t-shirts, I feel it would be classed as both a ‘virtual’ merchant trader; because it is selling goods over the Internet, and also a manufacturer; because it will involved in the making of the products itself.

With this the company will be dealing in both the B2B (Business to Business) market – when buying in the blank t-shirts and sending them for printing, and also the B2C (Business to Consumer) market when the goods are sold. (Rappa, 2001) To begin with I believe the main target market for the product will be that of young males aged from 16-30 – most of which will be either college or university students.

This is because from the age of sixteen upwards young men can start to earn money through working or receiving student loans. It is also at this age that they generally start to take a bit more care in their appearance and may start to look into the fashion industry to be seen as ‘cool’ by their friends. By 30 I believe that most men may have started to drift away from a younger mans perspective on fashion, although undoubtedly there will hopefully still be some that do follow it with interest.

At this age also many will not still be at university. It is a fact that younger people in this country are more likely to purchase goods over the Internet than older persons – 57% of men aged 15 – 24 use the Internet with 89% of them being aware of the retail possibilities it holds (www. mori. com, 2001). There is also the fact that nearly half of the male population in the UK surf the web, this compared with only a third of women. (www. mori. com, 2001).