True story

True story

- VARUN GODINHO

It’s been a meteoric rise, and a scarcely believable one at that, for luxury e-commerce platform Farfetch. It may be at its strongest now amid the pandemic, but it has mustered over a decade of technology and retail know-how to get to this point. In an exclusive interview with Gulf Business, the brand’s founder, chairman and CEO José Neves, outlines the big picture

When the share price of a much-touted New York Stock Exchange-listed company falls off a cliff edge within a year of its debut, there are legitimate questions raised about its future. On August 8, 2019, luxury fashion e-commerce major Farfetch announced that it was acquiring New Guards Group (NGG) – the parent company of Off-White, Heron Preston and Palm Angels – for $675m. The market responded by forcing its shares down 40 per cent. It would take far more than that to unnerve the now 46-year-old founder, chairman and CEO of Farfetch, José Neves.

A year on, he stands vindicated. “The two biggest days ever on Farfetch were not Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Single’s Day. They were the two Nike Off-White launches we’ve done on the platform since the acquisition. The last one got 800 million hits on our platform,” says Neves, adding that the acquisition of NGG quickly met its objective of driving free and organic traffic towards the platform.

But rather than just being a win for Farfetch, NGG too reaped a rich harvest on its digital profile post the acquisition. “NGG was only 2 per cent direct to consumer online when we acquired them. And in Q2 [2020], it was already 20 per cent of their business. So we multiplied tenfold their direct to consumer digital channels. And we think it will be 50 per cent of their business in the next few years.”