The Financial Times has bought a minority stake in The Business of Fashion, the digital media start-up for the fashion industry.
The FT is leading the digital media brand’s Series B funding round, alongside existing backers including Index Ventures, Felix Capital, and luxury product firm LVMH. It declined to disclose the size of the stake and the value of the funding. Imran Amed, BoF’s chief executive and editor in chief, founded the company in 2007 as a blogger with no experience in the fashion business. It raised some $2.1m from investors in 2013.
The London-based company claims an unlikely international audience of 5m for its online, print and events business, including 35k “members”. But its conferences have attracted big names, including Stella McCartney and Kim Kardashian. It claims to have a network of 100 contributors and staff based variously in London, New York, Paris and Shanghai.
In 2015, Fast Company magazine listed BoF as one of the 10 most innovative media companies because it “is telling a deeper story; it’s a news website dedicated to the less exciting, but all-important numbers side of the fashion industry. Founded by Canadian-British fashion expert Imran Amed, the site pays as much attention to Alexander Wang’s Spring/Summer collection as it does to Gucci’s years-long struggle to raise its stock prices. And the fashion world is tuning in with big names like Tory Burch and Oscar de la Renta chief executive Alex Bolen publicly citing Amed’s site as a power player in fashion industry news.”
BoF is believed to have revenue of some £5-10m. Its apparent success prompted Conde Nast this year to launch a competitor, Vogue Business.
The Canada-born Amed said the FT’s investment would allow the Business of Fashion to build up its membership business and to expand into adjacent sectors including beauty, watches and jewellery. It is believed the FT plans collaboration with the luxury magazines (eg How to Spend It) which it publishes with the newspaper’s weekend edition.
For the FT, the investment reflects a strategy to invest in subscriptions-based B2B media. It has sought to acquire the highly-successful, privately-owned The Information. Earlier this year, it bought a majority stake in the The Next Web digital media and events company.
Although Business of Fashion does produce some print, it is primarily a digital publisher and events organiser. Its emphasis on the business of fashion provides a contrast with the traditionally broad content of trade magazine brands. It’s an approach that invites replication in other sectors, especially perhaps as vertical integration by B2C media owners. Which is what Vogue thinks.
