It’s hard to run a successful ecommerce site, if you are a one person shop or even for a company with significant resources.
NYPost.com reported that Style.com is being sold by it’s current owner Condé Nast International. The buyer is Farfetch.
From the article:
Condé Nast International CEO Jonathan Newhouse, in a note to 75 staffers announcing the sale, said the e-commerce venture “had fallen very short of where we hoped [it] would be.”
It marks the second time Condé has taken a big swing at e-commerce — and missed.
In 2014, it sold a big stake in its once-hot shopping magazine, Lucky, to a joint venture that was supposed to be skilled in building it up as an e-commerce venture. But after a little more than a year of operating the JV, Condé’s partner, BeachMint, tossed in the towel and shut it down .
Style.com went through a few incarnations — first as an editorial content site before Condé decided that Vogue, W and its other glossies were better off developing their own branded sites.
Tip of the cap to Singing Dogs
This is more of a partnership than a sale IMO, since Conde Nast invested in Farfetch early on:
“As an early investor in Farfetch, this partnership is the next step in our evolving business relationship,” he commented. “It further unites two leaders in their respective sectors, combining best-in-class content with the world’s leading online luxury shopping destination.”
Source: http://brandchannel.com/2017/06/13/conde-nast-farfetch-061317/
Looks like a sale to me, as Farfetch will be the sole owner, it was of course a website sale real business, not the fluff of selling a domain name. You know real work.
I’m considering the fact that Conde Nast is a large investor in Farfetch, which started in 2013 as they lead a $20 million dollar investment. https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/03/conde-nast-leads-20m-round-in-boutique-marketplace-farfetch-its-third-and-biggest-e-fashion-investment-in-the-last-month/ and have also been involved in series C and E funding rounds. Farfetch may be the sole owner, but Conde Nast is part owner in the company is my point. Or how they stated “this partnership is the next step in our evolving business relationship”
Yes, this transaction involved several assets.