Tamara Mellon, the direct-to-consumer women’s luxury footwear brand, announced a $50 million Series C round of financing last week, making it one of the largest to date for a female-founded fashion brand. London-based investment firm Centricus led the latest round, with continued participation from existing investors, including NEA and Quadrille Capital. This brings Tamara Mellon Brand’s total capital raised to $87 million.
2019 has seen a surge of female-founded brands and companies setting major evaluation, funding and revenue milestones. According to Crunchbase, female-founded unicorns are being born at an unprecedented rate. This surge includes brands such as Rent The Runway, Glossier, Away, Style Seat, FabFitFun, Confluent, Airwallex, Horizon Robotics, and Vlocity. With only 12% of venture funding allocated to female founders, every major raise that happens for female-founded brands is a big step in the right direction for the industry. Tamara Mellon's raise is even more so of a win because the brand is less than three years old. This raise along with the success of the brand will hopefully give inspiration for other female-founded brands to raise such high amounts and other venture capitalists to not be so afraid of investing in female-founded companies.
Tamara Mellon was c0-founded by former Jimmy Choo co-founder, Tamara Mellon, and Jill Layfield in 2016. Tamara Mellon is a next-generation luxury women’s footwear brand. The brand is breaking all the traditional rules of fashion, eliminating the 6x retail markup by going direct-to-consumer, and ignoring the fashion calendar with weekly product drops. Tamara Mellon shoes are made in the best Italian factories, and the brand offers a complimentary cobbler service for two years after
purchase as part of a commitment to reimagining luxury service. As an outspoken advocate of women’s issues, Mellon is creating a community of like-minded, next-generation luxury consumers. Most recently, Tamara Mellon launched into two new categories: handbags and sneakers.
The brand will also use the new capital towards manufacturing innovation, retail expansion, and continued investments in growing the brand. Part of the growth plan includes expanding the team from 40 to 60 employees by the end of 2019. “Tamara and I are thrilled to have Centricus join our impressive group of investors,” Layfield says. “They are a smart and thoughtful team with an incredibly important global perspective. We are also very grateful to our customers and employees who have been with us for an amazing two-and-a-half years, and can’t wait for what comes next.”
Tamara Mellon experienced strong growth in 2018, increasing sales by 136% year over year, 36% of which came from repeat customers and had its first $1M sales day in October 2018. The digitally-led brand saw mobile traffic grow to over 80%, and was one of the first luxury brands to integrate with Apple Business Chat in a continued effort to further bridge the gap
between luxury service and technology.
Commenting on the investment, Centricus co-founder Nizar Al-Bassam said: “We are pleased to be supporting Tamara, Jill and their exceptional team at this crucial stage of Tamara Mellon brand’s development. The personal luxury market has attractive fundamentals and is ripe for disruption, driven by Millennial preferences for engagement with brands and access to products. Centricus has made a number of recent investments in the luxury space, and we see an exciting opportunity to support Tamara Mellon in further developing the brand, channel and product strategy that harnesses insights from data science to unlock the brand’s significant growth potential.”
