Tamara Mellon Raises $50 Million in Series C Funding
LOS ANGELES, June 17, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Tamara Mellon, the direct-to-consumer women's luxury footwear brand, announced a $50M Series C round of financing today, 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 $87M.
The brand will use the new capital towards manufacturing innovation, retail expansion, and continued investments in brand. The company also plans to grow the team from 40 to 60 employees by the end of 2019, led by its two female founders, Tamara Mellon and Jill Layfield.
"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 Brand 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 Brand in further developing the brand, channel and product strategy that harnesses insights from data science to unlock the brand's significant growth potential."
The company opened its first brick-and-mortar location in Los Angeles at Palisades Village, reimagining the luxury footwear retail experience. The store is modeled after a shoe closet, with each shoe style displayed in every size, creating Instagram-worthy shoe walls which customers can use to try on product at their leisure.
As part of Tamara Mellon Brand's continued commitment to complement all aspects of a woman's life, it launched handbags and sneakers, two new categories, since the beginning of 2019.
About Tamara Mellon Brand
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 reimagine luxury service. As an outspoken advocate of women's issues, Tamara Mellon is creating a community of like-minded, next-generation luxury consumers. To learn more, visit www.tamaramellon.com.
SOURCE Tamara Mellon
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