The Business of Fashion

Fashion investing | Return of the strategic investor?

Apax Partners, the London-based private equity firm, has abandoned its bid to take a stake in Escada AG, the embattled German fashion company.  Citing deteriorating market conditions, Apax stated that

"the recent evolution of the stock price and the weakness of the international financial market do not give a basis for pursuing the project."

This is absolutely the right decision. Not only has Escada become somewhat of an industry basket-case in recent years, on Wednesday the company also revised its earnings projections for year ending October 31 downwards yet again. EBITDA margins are  expected to fall by about 25% compared to 2007. The company cited recessionary conditions in the USA and other key markets as the reason behind the revisions. Escada's shares fell by 10.8% on Wednesday to 14.35 euros.

Roberto Cavalli for H&M: Rock-star pandemonium

Karl Lagerfeld for H&M. Roland Mouret for Gap. Giles Deacon for New Look. Proenza Schouler for Target. And the list goes on. You'd think by now that consumers would have started to tire of it all. At a Retail and Luxury Conference earlier this year, Peter Som said that he felt the whole thing was played out and that it was no longer a distinctive way of creating brand buzz, which I thought was a good point.

Well, one look at a video from Style.com (see below), which shows the pandemonium that erupted in New York when Roberto Cavalli and Canadian model Jessica Stam unveiled his own H&M collection on Thursday, and it seems there may be some mileage in this strategy yet.  I was surprised by the exhuberant reaction around the world and the amount of money that people were willing to spend. In the video, one girl has 12 bags of clothing which retailed for about $6,000.