LONDON — Frasers Group has purchased Matches in a deal valued at 52 million pounds, the retailer confirmed on Wednesday.
The deal will be settled in cash using Frasers’ existing reserves and facilities.
“Matches has always been a leader in online luxury retail and has incredible relationships with its brand partners. This acquisition will strengthen Frasers’ luxury offering, further deepening our relationships and accelerating our mission to provide consumers with access to the world’s best brands,” said Michael Murray, chief executive officer of the retail chain Frasers.
“While the global luxury environment is softer, we are confident that, by leveraging our industry-leading ecosystem, we will unlock synergies and drive profitable growth for Matches,” he added.
Matches CEO Nick Beighton will work closely with the team at Frasers to develop a strategy for the business.
“Since I joined Matches last year, we have made good progress, sharpening our brand and product curation and improving the day-to-day operations of the business. As a result, we have seen a resilient trading performance despite the challenging economic backdrop,” said Beighton.
“Being part of Frasers, with their utter commitment to luxury, will give this business access to greater scale, best-in-class retail expertise and the financial stability it needs to more effectively deliver for our brand partners and our customers,” he added.
The sale of Matches is a failure for its private equity owner Apax, which purchased the fast-growing retailer in September 2017 for reported valuation of $1 billion following a bidding frenzy by a number of private equity investors, including Permira and KKR.
Despite working closely, for a time, with co-founder Tom Chapman, Apax could not gain traction with the business on a commercial, management, or financial scale.
Last year, Apax pinned its hopes on Beighton, the former CEO of fast-fashion e-commerce giant Asos, to restore the business to profitability, and to much higher growth levels.
A tech and finance whiz, Beighton had helped take Asos from 178 million pounds in revenues to nearly 4 billion pounds by the time he left the company last October.
At Matches, he’s been making progress.
“We’re doing a massive cultural reboot and the reason for that is the team has had four different CEOs in as many years — having people anchored in what we’re trying to achieve is really important because we can’t do anything without the people,” Beighton said in an interview with WWD in November.
“Since I arrived, we significantly reduced fixed and variable costs. As we go into Christmas, we’re in good shape and we’ve got the stock levels we need and we’ve got an operational plan that everyone’s behind. We’re expecting the competitors to be quite promotional. We’re ready to react if necessary,” he added.
In the fiscal year ended on Jan. 31, 2023, sales dipped 1.7 percent to 380.1 million pounds, while losses widened to 70.9 million pounds from 39.8 million pounds. Beighton was only a few months into the new job when the results were reported.
