The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 9
BUSINESS
for example). They use dozens of virtual
credit cards with different identification
numbers, and link their checkout
attempts to shadow Gmail accounts oper-
ated by separate bots known as “activity
generators”.
Day and night, these bots open emails,
send emails, watch videos on YouTube —
anything to create the illusion that they
are legitimate, discrete accounts. Some
resellers go even further by renting high-
powered servers from the likes of Ama-
zon and Google, located in close proxim-Lucas Titus
created software
to help resellers
snap up prized
goods onlineNicola Elliott turned her back on journalism to set up NeomA
s Nicola Elliott
browsed for a
birthday gift for her
eco-conscious
younger sister Katie
in 2003, she faced a
conundrum.
Should she choose
something from Liberty
“with a beautiful bow on that
smells lovely, but she won’t
use” or “go to a crusty health
food shop and get her
something that smells
horrible but she will use”?
This was one of a series of
light-bulb moments that led
Elliott, now 43, to start Neom,
a wellness brand sellingcandles, diffusers and pillow
sprays, in 2005. She launched
it with family friend Oliver
Mennell, 40, and their timing
— before ethical homeware
took off — was good. Sales in
2020 were £29 million, up
from £15.7 million in 2019,
with a profit of £4.9 million,
delivered by 97 employees.
Elliott is a born disruptor.
“My mum says she was in
tears every single week
because I was a very naughty
child,” she said. “I was always
really pushing the boundaries
and was never satisfied.”
She moved to Newcastle to
study art history at
Northumbria University, with
the goal of being a journalist.
Having completed nine work
experience placements atfurther helped when Elliott
and Mennell sold a
“significant minority” stake
to private equity firm Piper in- “We ask what was the
thing that moved the dial,”
said Elliott. “There wasn’t
one thing, but lots of little
ones... Oliver and I say it’s
been a bit like walking Mount
Everest in flip-flops.”
Some of those turning
concept hadn’t been fully
realised. It was hard, hard
work... After two years, my
mum said, ‘You can go back
to journalism, you know.’ It
was basically her saying, ‘I
think you made a mistake.’ ”
Neom started to take off
after Michael Warshaw, who
built cosmetics giant Molton
Brown, invested £200,000 in- And its expansion was
points include Kylie Minogue
saying soon after the brand
launched that she used Neom
candles in her dressing
rooms. This led to a listing in
Selfridges in 2011, said Elliott.
Significant listings followed in
John Lewis in 2012, Amazon
Prestige in 2015 and
feelunique in 2016. The brand
continues to land new
stockists, among them goop,
Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness
brand, which started selling
Neom earlier this year.
Elliott said her customer
was “typically a 35 to 45-year-
old, multi-tasking, stressed
mum”, who will buy products
for all the family, not just
herself. “We sell more
packets of four pillow mists
than we do single items
because she’s putting one on
the side of each of the kids’
beds as well as her own.”
The online shopping boom
prompted by the pandemic
has helped the company’ssales grow by 50 per cent so
far this year. But it also had to
close a store at London’s
Liverpool Street station just a
month after it opened. Neom,
which makes 90 per cent of
its products in the UK, now
has five “wellness hubs”
within department stores and
has more planned for 2022.
Also on the cards is further
expansion into America and
China, and it is rumoured to
be eyeing a float at a possible
valuation of £100 million.
Elliott wouldn’t be drawn on
the specifics, but said: “Piper
has been in now for four
years, so they’re going to be
looking to move on. We’re
exploring our options. We’re
a fast-growth business.”
Asked for advice for
budding entrepreneurs,
Elliott, who lives between
homes in Harrogate and
London, said: “You don’t
have to reinvent the wheel,
you just have to do it better.”attention to the emergence of
natural beauty, guided by her
sister, who is on the board of
the World Wide Fund for
Nature. “I was turned on to a
greener, cleaner lifestyle
through her.”
Facing burn-out in her
work, she had experimented
with aromatherapy oils to
help her de-stress, and now
she looked into launching a
wellness brand. “It can be
quite a hard concept to get
hold of ... very evangelist and
reserved for those who are
prepared to get up at six in
the morning, drink green
smoothies and do yoga.”
She and Mennell invested
£15,000 between them to
launch Neom. Its first product
was a scented candle, which
was sold in spas for £35. It
took time for the idea to catch
on: “It was touch and go for
the first seven or eight years
because we were too early to
market and the wellbeingMariah Carey stressed me out, so I went into wellness
women’s magazines during
her degree, she took an
editorial assistant job at Minx
magazine when she
graduated in 1999; she was
paid £12,000 a year. “I was
literally sat on the floor
putting stamps on envelopes.”
After she was laid off when
the title closed a year later,
she worked for Heat magazine
as a showbiz reporter.
Climbing the ranks of
women’s magazines, she
eventually became associate
editor at Glamour — but
constant travel took its toll
and the final straw was
working with the arch-diva
Mariah Carey. “I was called in
the middle of the night by her
agent saying if we didn’t
change the pedicurist for the
shoot [the next day], the
whole thing was going to be
pulled. I was like, ‘I can’t work
with these people any more.’ ”
But all the while, Elliott
had been paying closeHOW I MADE IT
NICOLA ELLIOTT FOUNDER OF NEOM
Hannah Prevett
Deputy editor, Times
Enterprise Networkity to the retailer’s own server to reduce
latency. While some resellers troll the
masses by posting pictures of PlayStation
5s stacked high in their living room, most
swap tips in closed online chat forums
known as “cook groups”.
Curtis Taylor, 26, runs Peachy Pings, a
cook group on the social network Dis-
cord that charges its 412 members £35 a
month. Peachy Pings members reap the
benefits of monitors — software that con-
stantly refreshes a retailer’s webpage and
pings a notification to the group as soon
as sought-after goods are back in stock.
Crucially, notifications arrive about
five minutes quicker than publicly availa-
ble restock alerts on Twitter, providing
the edge that resellers need to swipe
goods before the masses arrive.
“Some of the people in cook
groups are absolute geniuses,” said
Ben, a 23-year-old reseller from Lon-
don who declined to give his real
name. “One time, this 14-year-old kid
made a script [code used to automate
processes] that meant you could buy
PlayStation 5s from Argos the day before
they went on sale. It took them half a day
to figure out what was going on.”
Ben made about £7,000 a year resel-
ling trainers, streetwear and tickets to
club nights when he was at university in
Nottingham, before getting a job as an
actuary after he graduated. Now, he
works from home between 9am and 6pm
with his cook group open on a laptop
next to him. When he hears a ping, he
drops what he is doing and quickly snaf-
fles as many PlayStation 5s or graphics
cards as he can get his hands on.
Recently, he made an £8,000 profit in
a single drop by buying 40 sets of “ultra
premium” Pokémon cards, released in
limited quantity to commemorate its
25th anniversary.
After reselling goods worth between
£250,000 and £300,000 over the years,
Ben has set up a limited company and
hired an accountant.
“I am not a passionate actuary...
motivation-wise, it’s quite tricky because
there are days where I make more money
reselling than I do in an entire month
from my actual job,” he said.
Developers and resellers acknowledge
that their behaviour is controversial, but
they claim it helps burnish brands such
as Nike and Adidas by exacerbating the
scarcity of their trainers. The real prob-
lem, they argue, is the lack of supply.
“If you deleted all bots from the inter-
net tomorrow, I don’t think the price of a
PlayStation 5 [on the secondary market]
is going back to the retail price. The num-
ber of people who want a PS5 far exceeds
the supply,” said Casey.F
or retailers, bots risk alienating loyal
customers and cause their websites
to crash. Among the most commonly
used defences are “captchas”,
where customers are asked to click
on trains or planes or taxis in a block of
pictures. When they identify suspicious
behaviour, some retailers ask shoppers to
perform object-orientation tasks, such as
rotating a picture of an upside-down tea-
pot to its correct position.
“Us developers push an update that
improves performance on a certain site,
then retailers realise 90 per cent of their
stock has gone to bots,” Titus said. “So
retailers will change something that
breaks the bot, and then us developers
have to adjust and it goes back and forth,
back and forth like that.”
John Graham-Cumming, chief technol-
ogy officer at the cybersecurity company
Cloudflare, believes the power of
machine learning will ultimately mean
retailers win out in the game of cat and
mouse. He predicts bots will be largely
sidelined in the same way that email pro-
viders now, in effect, filter spam.
As far as this Christmas goes, though,
bots remain a formidable force. Many
parents will find that if they truly want
their kids to have a PlayStation 5, they
will have to pay through the nose for it.S
imon Clements made a prom-
ise last year that he has come
to regret deeply. After telling
his son he could have a Play-
Station 5 for his 18th birth-
day, Clements scoured retail-
ers’ websites daily to track
one down. When he con-
fessed he had been unable to
buy one, his son, who is autis-
tic, reacted badly.
“We’ve had a lot of problems. There
have been tears and tantrums — he
doesn’t understand that sometimes you
just can’t get things,” said Clements, who
owns the Yorkshire Pie bakery in Leeds.
His efforts for his son’s birthday this year
have once again been fruitless. “All I can
do is keep trying,” the 48-year-old said.
Ordinary shoppers such as Clements
stand little chance against an unseen
army of tech-savvy resellers, who roam
the web hoovering up goods in short sup-
ply — before flipping them at vastly
inflated prices. The key weapons
deployed by these 21st-century touts are
known as bots — pieces of software that
automate the checkout process in less
than a second. Resellers set them up to
make dozens of checkout attempts
simultaneously.
The proliferation of bots is exacer-
bating the shortages caused by mal-
functioning global supply chains. This
Christmas, shoppers around the world
are being comprehensively outgunned
by resellers swiping everything from
graphics cards to Pokémon collectibles in
the blink of an eye.
The explosion of bots over the past
three years is a direct consequence of the
marketing tactics employed by Nike and
Adidas. The sportswear giants deliber-
ately under-serve huge demand for their
trainers by selling limited quantities in
hyped “drops” that burnish their brands.
That, in turn, has created a booming sec-
ondary market where limited-edition
trainers sell at prices multiple times the
original retail price.
Few have capitalised more spectacu-
larly than 19-year-old Lucas Titus. When
he was 14, the London-based Titus
bought a few pairs of Ultraboost train-
ers from the Yeezy line developed by
Adidas and rapper Kanye West, and
resold them for a profit of up to £150 per
pair. And when he started dabbling in
automation, things really took off.
“I used Android emulators on my
PC to emulate seven different smart-
phones to tap 1,000 times a second. I
wasn’t expecting it to work, but it got
me four pairs of Yeezy Zebras which
resold for £1,300 [almost ten times
the retail price]. That was quite
something for me,” Titus said.
He taught himself to code and
launched Cybersole, a bot that resel-
lers have used to gatecrash drops, know-
ing there will always be a collector or
“hype beast” willing to cough up more to
buy the trainers from them.S
ince Titus launched it 3½ years ago,
Cybersole has successfully com-
pleted two million “checkouts”,
buying goods worth $300 million
(£225 million). His company had
amassed £2.6 million in retained earn-
ings by the middle of last year, allowing
Titus, who is now juggling a computer
science degree with his own business, to
rent a luxury apartment overlooking the
River Thames.
He acknowledges, though, that the
outlook is uncertain. Hyped drops from
Nike and Adidas are becoming more
infrequent, spurring resellers to turn to
non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and graphics
cards, where margins are fatter. PS5s sell
for an average of £542 on the resale plat-
form StockX, compared with a retail
price of £450. One of Nvidia’s top graph-
ics cards — the GeForce RTX 3090
Founders Edition — resells for £1,838,
compared with a retail price of £1,399.
Bot developers charge an upfront fee
and a monthly subscription. They have
capped the number of users to preserve
the value of the product, creating a
vibrant resale market for bots where
users resell their licence keys for thou-
sands of pounds.
Casey (he did not want to give his full
name), the developer behind WhatBot,
another sports shoe bot, said some devel-
opers have quietly made millions by issu-
ing new licence keys at the resale price.The bots
that stole
Christmas
We are used to the scramble for
the must-have presents at this
time of year. Now there’s an
army of tech-savvy resellers
who are one step ahead of the
crowd, writes Sam Chambers
SAM
CHAMBERS
ILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWEN£150
mark-up on Adidas sports shoes by
teenage reseller Lucas Titus£300k
worth of goods resold over the years
by an actuary with a side hustleBot owners and developers also rent
their bots temporarily. Acquiring one is
just the first step for serious resellers,
who go to extraordinary lengths to trick
websites into thinking that their pur-
chases are being made by many people in
different locations.
Resellers rent proxy servers with dif-
ferent IP addresses for each individual
checkout attempt. In a practice known as
“jigging”, they configure bots to enter
subtle variations on their home address
at the checkout (“Rd.” instead of “road”,