What does 30 years in the luxury fashion industry teach you? For Carmen Busquets, it’s that you can’t take anything with you when you go.
The Venezuelan-born entrepreneur, who was both co-founder and founding investor of Net-a-Porter in 2000 and has invested in major companies, including Farfetch, Cult Beauty, Lyst and others since, is embarking on a purge of sorts. She’s collected fashion pieces from emerging designers, sustainable brands and artisans over the years. Her next project will be to sell them off, starting next year. All proceeds will go to charity — a focus for Busquets is philanthropic work, and just about everything she does these days is for the Carmen Busquets Foundation, which she is in the process of setting up in the US.
When I visit her apartment on Manhattan’s West Side, she’s about to start getting ready for a gala benefitting Glasswing International, a nonprofit providing youth empowerment programmes in Latin America and New York. She sits on the board. Her glam crew is setting up as we speak.
It seems a sense of existentialism has set in. It’s clear she’s thinking about her legacy — she says that it’s her key priority for 2025 — and what she’ll leave behind. She’s adamant that she doesn’t want her things ending up in a landfill and worries that the luxury industry has veered towards resembling fast fashion in recent years.
“If I die tomorrow, my family would inherit this whole collection. It would end up in liquidation when the very reason why I bought those pieces was to tell people: these pieces have value. And if the items end up in a landmine? The very reason I bought them was to avoid that. That was a terrible realisation,” Busquets says of the possibility. “I have a responsibility to sell my closet and my assets. Otherwise, my message will get lost.”
Her message, which she shared with me initially at her apartment and during a follow-up Zoom call, is that luxury has gone off course and needs to clean itself up. She calls it an “embarrassing shift towards inefficiency”. Fashion companies have gotten lazy, she says. It’s why so many of luxury’s e-commerce plays, some of which she’s personally invested in, have failed to reach their full potential.
She’s blunt in her reasoning for why luxury has gone wrong, even with the “advanced technologies and analytics that could have avoided this”, as she says. The problems boil down to greed on the side of investors — a desire to grow at all costs, even when that growth comes at the expense of the core business model — in addition to poor leadership. Another problem is a lack of curation coupled with overproduction, an overwhelm of stuff that’s then presented to customers who are now savvier and can see through most marketing; another is an overall inability or unwillingness to listen to those consumers.
The only way forward, she believes, is to prioritise circular business models and limit overproduction. She pushes back on the idea that luxury is consumed — the industry has clients or customers, not consumers. “Consumers need to consume,” says Busquets. “Luxury is not a need; it is a want.”
She has advice. Brands need to prioritise profitability; she’s wary of tone-deaf brands. She says that, when it comes to the future of luxury e-commerce, companies already have the answers because the business model and the formula have not changed. Not only that, but companies now have tools like artificial intelligence to help them improve on it.
I sense a sort of frustration from her that things have gone wrong for so many. When we meet for the first time, it’s a few days after Mytheresa announced its intention to acquire Yoox Net-a-Porter. The deal is set to close next year. I ask her what she thinks about it.
“I am glad that My Theresa acquired Net-a-Porter,” she says. “Hopefully, it will restore it to what it used to be — a profitable company with organic growth.”
Mytheresa, she says, is following the formula: curate and segment luxury goods (this can be done using technology; she’s not precious about that) in a way that’s digestible to the customer. Most importantly, know your customer, and don’t grow beyond reasonable limits for the model.
She does see promise in the fashion industry — often in new formulas. She’s very excited about Heat, the mystery fashion box startup founded by Joe Wilkinson and Mario Maher in 2019, one of her last investments, that has raised $5 million to date. She says she saw herself in the founders: “I always say I’m not investing any longer, and then I get emotional. I see a younger version of me. They are self-driven.” Busquets was also attracted to their business model. It tackles fashion’s overstock problem by giving brands a way to sell and make use of excess inventory without discounting. She likens it to a boutique, but one with a built-in membership that develops trust off of knowing and delivering what people want, particularly the younger Gen Z customer, which is a primary interest of hers.
She says she’s noticed just how interested Gen Z is in vintage. “They are hunting my closet,” she says. The details of the sale are still coming together, including who she’ll partner with to make it happen, but vintage enthusiasts of all ages can expect to find an assortment of pieces from major brands — everyone from McQueen to Mary Katrantzou — as well as emerging brands like Destree, Coperni and Des Phemes. She has a collection of fine jewellery and antiques from artisans, as well as an upcycled collection she’s commissioned from seamstresses across the world.
“I feel like it’s cool if my closet ends up with a millennial or Gen Z customer.” She wants to keep them away from fast fashion. “That’s why it’s so bad — you are talking to the youngest of customers, and you are bombarding them with things they don’t need.”
It’s something that will be of high importance to her. Even after 30 years, and despite any criticisms, she’s passionate about the industry. “I still love fashion. It’s one of my biggest communication tools, being deaf. It’s an interpretation of who you are. It’s like your skin. You say a lot, or you say nothing with what you wear. That is empowering.”
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