As the recession continues to bite hard with no real sense of being on the way up, marketers and company owners spend many a long hour trying to figure out ways to get us to part with our money

The fashion industry is worth collectively about £166m ($300m) a year from the high end couture right down to the Primarks of this world. The fashion industry stands as one of the most well oiled machines in the business world, so spare a thought when their excess inventory began to build up as the recession started to bite. Any company left with huge amounts of stock is bad in the eyes of the shareholders and the bank manager.

Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson then saw an opportunity and

they created Gilt Groupe in the US. Their backgrounds complimented the startup, Maybank was at eBay in the early days before the stock market flotation and Wilkis Wilson was a merchandising executive for Louis Vuitton and Bulgari.

Also they looked at using a different model instead of a straight sell. Make it exclusive and create a sense of urgency.

You had to be invited to even gain access to the sales and this made it very popular with the fashionistas as it was their secret club of discount offers (invites are now all over Twitter). The sales lasted no more than 24 hours or once the stock was sold out and you only got warning the day before that a sale was going to take place.

So how much were people saving? The average was well over 50% discount with the maximum going as far as 70%. For example (according to Forbes) an ostrich feather jacket retailing at $3,175 was sold on the Gilt site for a mere $618, a hefty saving of $2,557. We'll never know the full extend of Gilt Groupe's accounts as profits are kept secret.

It's an interesting business model and I put together a web startup for the UK in late 2008 but stopped as soon as Brand Alley launched (when I say stopped I mean it was a sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach as my wife showed me a full page ad in the Sunday Times Style magazine). It happens, you just get over it and start looking at the next opportunity.

The invite-only discount model is an interesting one as it could be replicated to other markets. I don't see any point in another fashion version as there are more than 100 copycat sites out there now.

Could the car industry benefit from the same model? The pictures of car plants all over the world with their completed products with nowhere to go, the scrapping scheme works but there's nothing like getting a good deal. How about holidays that are due to depart next week? Fruit and vegetable suppliers who, instead of disposing close to use by date stock, could sell direct to the consumer.

The opportunities are plentiful, it needs people to pick them up and do something with them.

Jase Bell is a software developer and organiser of Open Coffee Coleraine.

You can reach him via Twitter http://www.twitter.com/jasebell