by Barbara Walshe

It’s 9am on Brick Lane, an indecent hour to be out and about this trendy part of East London. Only one or two shops and restaurants have opened - mainly for the stragglers who never quite made it home last night.

A little further down the road, at Truman’s Brewery, it’s a different story. Thousands of women are queuing up outside what looks like an empty office. Well dressed and ranging from their 20s to their 50s, there’s some friendly jostling as the doors open and they file in, perusing rail after rail of designer clothing.

Although no one else knows it, what’s actually happening inside is a designer sample sale featuring clothes from Alexander McQueen, Missoni and Marc Jacobs – where everything is sold for a snip of the original price, sometimes 80 per cent off. How did they find out about it? Well, they’re part of a club that specialises in inside fashion info. A club just over a year old, with 46,000 members… and counting. Its name? Fashion Confidential.

It came as no surprise to Charlotte Hinton, founder of Fashion Confidential (or FC, as she puts it), when the UK online shopping market was valued at £21.4bn this year. Nor is it surprising that female millionaires in the UK are expected to outstrip their male counterparts for the first time ever this year. Many of them are former colleagues of Hinton and members of her fashion website – all cash rich, time poor businesswomen who use FC to buy high quality, stylish clothes.

“I worked as an IP/Media lawyer in a corporate environment for eight years and we would all come in after the weekend saying look at my bag, my top, my coat. Many of us would be saying ‘I’d like this’ or ‘Where did you get that?’ and then we’d try and get it but weren’t able to because they either weren’t in stock or we didn’t have the time to get out and buy them,” she says.

In January last year, everything came together. “I was at a sale at House of Fraser and there were all these women at it who would sit behind their desks all day in the city thinking they were very prim and proper, literally fighting each other for the 50 per cent off Chloe bag!” She then went back to the office and told her colleagues who all stampeded down there and came back with their buys. “At that moment, it clicked.”

Hinton realised women like these wanted reliable fashion information – from the latest hot fashion item to where the best sales and sample sales were – and somewhere they could find it fast. So she ditched her day job, sold her flat and began working out of a small office to create her members-only fashion website, Fashion Confidential, launched in May.

So what is in FC? Essentially, it’s a website anyone can join that offers its members fashion advice and exclusive offers. Each day, Hinton and her assistants trawl through the fashion-focused papers, press releases and web to find out what’s hot, new and where to get it before anyone else. They then post the most important information on their website or in a weekly email. Hinton puts it simply: “Instead of going through 20 magazines and 40 email services, we do that it for you and funnel it down into what everyone’s talking about.”

Together with advice and offers, they give their top nine (“everyone does ten!”) buys of the week, which range from bags to skirts to dresses etc, which women can click through to the web and buy. But, unlike other online fashion websites like Net-A-Porter and Matches, FC doesn’t actually sell the pieces or take commission. It
focuses on pointing women in the right direction and telling them where and when they can get them – whether that’s online or in-store.

"There were all of these women who would sit behind their desks in the city thinking they were very prim and proper, literally fighting each other for the 50 per cent off Chloe bag! And, at that moment, it clicked."  Charlotte Hinton, Fashion Confidential

Given its start in life, FC’s membership is largely businesswomen. Hinton jump started it in May last year by emailing 100 of her ex-colleagues telling them about the site and asking them to forward it onto their fashion hungry friends. It had 2,000 members by the end of first week, and 42,000 within a year.

To grow and maintain such a following, Hinton’s eight years experience as a lawyer is crucial. “Before I put something online or send out our email, I sit back and think ‘I’m really busy, the phone’s going, do I really want to know that?’ That’s how I keep everything short and sweet. It’s so our members can take ten minutes out and be confident that this is all they need to know for the week. It brings everything into one space,” says Hinton.

There were a few glitches in the beginning. “There’s an element of the fashion world you can get caught up in, like neon leggings or the latest colours being ‘in fashion’, and thinking everyone will want to know about it. In fact, a lot of my members are real women working in an office who want to wear something that is a nod to fashion. So I have to constantly put my lawyer hat on for that.”

Although Hinton is excited about a free, twice-yearly glossy FC magazine for its members launching in 2008, it’s the immediacy and accessibility of her online business that remains a priority. Over the last 18 months, her impressive membership numbers ensure that she gets them incredible deals - a VIP waiting list for the Prada phone, access to the No 7 anti-ageing cream before anyone else, discounts on the IT jeans of the moment and so on. But it has also become somewhat a victim of its own success.

Over 6,000 members registered for 100 VIP sample sale passes recently, which meant 5,900 people went away disappointed. To combat this, Hinton is launching Absolutely Confidential, a selective membership club where, for a fee, such members will be guaranteed exclusive offers and discounts. There will still be the advice, star buys and fashion forward info about what’s going on in the industry for everyone else, but for those who are really serious about fashion, Absolutely Confidential will guarantee the edge with events and exclusive offers.

Currently, FC is funded by selective advertising appearing on the site, though the editorial content, Hinton is quick to point out, is completely independent of that. Does she miss the trappings her old lifestyle at all? “I won every single point on my last case in law and everyone said at the time ‘No, you won’t do it’. The feeling I got wasn’t as good as the one I get with this every day. Back then, there was ten minutes of ‘Isn’t that absolutely amazing’ before I was given my next project on which to waste another six months of my life! With this, I’m thinking about what we can introduce all the time, what else I can find. It’s an amazing feeling to know I’ve gone out on a limb and left a safe profession to do this.”

Get the look and inside scoop with www.fashionconfidential.co.uk