This is a major move for PPR, luxury and sport & lifestyle group who has invested €10 million ($13 million U.S. dollars) investment in Bigfoot I, the Rocket holding company that controls Russian fashion commerce site Lamoda, South American fashion site Dafiti and also has a stake in Namshi, the Samwer’s fashion effort in the Middle East. Rocket Internet, the incubator started and run by the Samwer Brothers in Germany.
The move is a sign of how established fashion businesses in developed markets are continuing to look for ways of better penetrating emerging markets, and are riding the wave of continued Internet and smartphone growth to do it.
All we can say is this sure makes it easy to control fashion sites that are influential!
The Samwer brothers still focus on Europe with sites like fashion/shoe site Zalando, Square competitor Payleven, and many more. But it has also been putting a major effort into replicating that model in less crowded, fast-growing markets in regions like Asia, South America and Eastern Europe.
The cash-for-equity investment appears to be the first made by a fashion company in a Rocket operation, but for now it will not see PPR pushing its brands directly on the site. Those brands include iconic names like Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, as well as Puma, Tretorn and the French audiovisual chain FNAC.
Although PPR has made its own investments into online business, you can see how leveraging another company’s networks in developing markets can be useful to PPR. Russia is already the fastest growing Internet population in Europe and it has a burgeoning middle class, but also a sizable population of wealthy, fashion-conscious shopaholics.