When Sugru was a new gimmick it made a gift idea for that nephew you have no shared interests with. I suspect that a lot of the initial sales were clueless gift

When Sugru was a new gimmick it made a gift idea for that nephew you have no shared interests with. I suspect that a lot of the initial sales were clueless gift purchases, the packaging looked legit, the product was theoretically useful and what else do you buy someone when everyone has everything (including Blu-Tak)? Was there any need to get tens of millions in funding? If you have a deal with Target stores or John Lewis in the UK then you can order from your suppliers what they need, do a back of the envelope calculation as to what you can fund on the basis of those sales and stock accordingly. Greed and hubris gets the better of people though. We have seen it before with boo.com and in plenty of other examples. Much is said in the article about the 90% lost by investors, I think there is another 90% - I doubt that 90% of this stuff was ever opened or used. It was gifted by well meaning mums and aunties. Then those recipients didn't rate or use the product enough for it to become 'as exciting as cellotape'. £2 million buys you a posh house in London, so the bank loan wasn't that big in the scheme of things, but a lot of money if your product is neither 'fast moving' or 'big ticket'.