If you wanted to create a company worth £100 million – in the space of four years – selling just one product, what would that product be? An artificial-intelligence robot that promised to change the way we live our lives? Perhaps a cancer-beating drug?
Ankur Shah chose a pair of slippers.
“It was absurd. It was surreal,” he says, as he remembers the afternoon in 2013 when he hit upon his idea in a flash of Jerry Maguire inspiration. He even, as they always do in Hollywood films, scribbled down his business plan on a yellow legal pad. “It said: ‘I’m going to make the world’s favourite slipper.’ And as I did it, I had a grin on my face, thinking, ‘This is absolutely idiotic.’