Violet Grey is back under old — and new — ownership.
Cassandra Grey has acquired the luxury retailer back from Coupang-owned Farfetch, with help from private equity veteran Sherif Guirgis, who is helming the company as chairman, chief executive officer and co-owner.
The price tag Grey and Guirgis paid, as well as other financial terms of the deal, were not disclosed, though Grey told WWD in an exclusive interview that it was always in the cards.
“There was never any question if I could have bought back Violet Grey, even three months after the acquisition, I would’ve,” Grey told WWD exclusively. “It wasn’t for sale until now.”
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Grey will act as chairman and artistic director of Violet Lab, Violet Grey’s new brand development arm. “We’ve been able to get behind brands over the years,” Grey said. “But we’ve never had that infrastructure. This is about organizing that core competency and being able to best serve them through incubation and acceleration.”
One such example of a brand that got its start at Violet Grey is Augustinus Bader, which has seen sales swell in record time. “A successful launch includes positioning,” said Sarah Brown, Violet Grey’s chief brand officer. “Brand, product, people behind it, storytelling, creating the desire and putting it in the hands of the most influential people are all what ‘make it a thing.’”
All of those factors, Brown posited, drive customer acquisition and retention. “We always talk about it as garnering trust,” she said. “You can sell anybody anything once, you can make anything look sexy once. When they keep coming back, that’s how we measure the success of a launch.”
Scaling that formula is next on the docket, including expanding Violet Grey’s presence beyond its single brick-and-mortar door in Los Angeles.
That mandate comes at a challenging time for the luxury market, and beauty is not an exception. Earlier this month, Net-a-porter revealed it was winding down its in-house beauty operations and will debut an affiliate model with brands next year.
The climate hasn’t made Guirgis any less bullish. “The brand identity, the creative, the meticulous curation and the confidence,” he said of Violet Grey’s differentiation points. “We just have to resource the company with the exceptional execution-oriented people and strategy to deliver,” Guirgis said.
Farfetch first spent $49.4 million in cash, $1.3 million in reverse vesting shares and $5 million of restricted stock units to buy Violet Grey in 2022 in a bid for digital beauty shoppers, one that saw its own beauty division come to fruition. Since then, Farfetch sundowned its beauty business, entered prepack administration and South Korea-based Coupang snapped up the company for $500 million.