Why Appear Here is branching out from New York to Somerset

The timing, says founder Ross Bailey, was “sort of poetic”. Days previously, the retail marketplace – which has seen triple-digit growth year-on-year since its launch in 2013 – was celebrating the close of a funding round more than triple the value of its last Series B raise with investors including JLL Spark, Octopus, Forward Partners, Meyer Bergman, Matthew Freud and Concrete VC. A week and a half later, everything Appear Here represents became precisely what the world was suddenly shying away from.