Internet Fashion Group, the e-commerce retailer backed by Berlin-based start-up incubator Rocket Internet has raised €32m in funding and has poached Amazon executive Romain Voog to be its CEO.
The €32m investment came from Tengelmann Ventures and Verlinvest and the start-up is now valued at €2.8bn.
Rocket has a 23.5pc stake along with Kinnevik, which has a 25.1pc stake, and Access Industries, which has a stake of 7.4pc in Global Fashion Group.
Global Fashion Group is a merger of five of Rocket Internet’s emerging fashion sites.
Voog spent the past seven years at Amazon, most recently as the company’s president and managing director for France. Before that he held leadership roles at Carrefour and is a former Boston Consulting strategy consultant.
Global Fashion Group also appointed Nils Chrestin as CFO of the expanding fashion e-commerce site.
The hot points for e-commerce for the next decade: fashion and food
Global Fashion Group delivers fashion e-commerce across 27 emerging markets in four continents.
In February, Berlin-based Rocket Internet invested €496m for a 30pc stake in Delivery Hero and acquired seven other food delivery companies. It says food delivery is the next frontier of e-commerce.
Food and fashion are viewed by Rocket Internet as the key hotpoints of e-commerce over the next decade.
Last year, Rocket Internet consolidated five of its emerging fashion brands into one US$3.5bn (€2.7bn) entity called Global Fashion Group.
Publicly-listed Rocket, which was established by three brothers Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer in 2007, has actively incubated numerous technology companies and fosters ambitions to become as big as Amazon in the US or Alibaba in China.
Its mission statement reads: “to become the world’s largest internet platform outside the United States and China.”
Fashion show image via Shutterstock
