Once upon a time there was a visionary named José Neves, a man with a passion for technology and an interest in fashion that led him to bring to life an idea that would change the face of online luxury commerce. That idea was called Farfetch, established in London in 2007. At first, the platform was dedicated to connecting customers with independent boutiques around the world, providing them with access to a wide variety of exclusive products. In other words, a customer in Barcelona could explore the inventory of the most prominent multi-brand store in Athens through Farfetch.
As demand grew, Farfetch expanded its services, including acquiring storage space for those independent stores’ merchandise. In addition, it began to finance the purchase of those points of sale and became a partner for luxury brands that ventured into the world of online commerce in the 2010s.
This formula for success led Neves to take the company public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018, and for it to reach a value of more than 23 billion dollars in 2021. Of course, so much activity had an impact on uncontrolled costs and investments. risky; which, added to the global slowdown in luxury trade, precipitated a collapse in the share price, which caused the company’s value to drop close to $200 million at the end of November. To keep his creation alive, Neves desperately needed an injection of liquidity, which arrived on Monday in the form of $500 million from the pockets of Coupang, known as “South Korea’s answer to Amazon,” in a deal that included delisting. price of Farfetch shares, which fell 35 percent that day.
Farfetch thus avoids bankruptcy, but not its short-term problems. The unknown of what will happen to the company extends to all those businesses that Neves incorporated into his portfolio over the years: Browns in 2015, Stadium Goods in 2018 or New Guards Group (Off-White, Palm Angels, Heron Preston …) in 2019.
Richemont has announced that the complex August 2022 deal, in which Farfetch planned to buy a 47.5% stake in Yoox Net-a-Porter, is a thing of the past. As in the worst breakups, next year Richemont will have to look for a buyer again like someone returning to dating apps to find someone who will take away the pain. As if that were not enough, on Tuesday it became public that Frasers Group had bought Matches (another luxury online fashion retailer, which less than a decade ago was valued at one billion) for €60 million. The operation, which will be carried out in cash, includes the purchase of 100% of the shares of a total of six companies and their debts.
Farfetch, Matches and YNAP have been evaluated with very unrealistic figures and received investments that they have not been able to cope with (people who invest in something expect to obtain a profit in return). They have also been affected by the same underlying issue: the luxury consumer does not like to purchase it online, because as Bruno Pavlovsky, president of Chanel, assures, it is impossible to replicate the experience experienced in the store on a digital level. The luxury consumer (especially the new, younger luxury consumer) likes to shop online when products are significantly discounted. For example, the button that is the Canadian Ssense.
Now the good news. If last week we talked about the highly anticipated and never announced opening of Dover Street Market in Paris, today we can confirm that it will take place in spring at 35-37 rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
Mango, which sees its 40th birthday approaching, took advantage on Wednesday of the announcement of the renewal of its board of directors, which will incorporate five new members including Marc Puig, president and CEO of the group that bears his last name, to advance that it will close the current year with double-digit growth, projecting to reach around 3,000 million euros in sales. In 2022 it closed with revenues of 2,688 million euros, experiencing an increase of 20%. In addition, it achieved a net profit of 82 million euros, its highest figure in almost a decade.
Across the pond Kristina O’Neill has been appointed director of Sotheby’s Media, a new division of the auction house, and editor-in-chief of Sotheby’s Magazine. O’Neill, who led the Wall Street Journal’s monthly lifestyle magazine from 2012 until last April, was one of the last highly paid editors (the last will inevitably be Anna Wintour, not a minute before and not a minute after of the exact day and hour in which she herself decides to stop being one). His appointment is a ray of hope both for all those directors who have had to transform themselves into something similar to content creators, and for those looking for work (Edward Enninful, soon to be former director of British Vogue and former editorial director of all its European editions , and Laura Brown, who ran InStyle USA from 2016 to 2022, are still out of work.) Kristina O’Neill’s title was probably on many industry professionals’ Christmas wish lists. Happy holidays to them. And for you.
