- Tamara Mellon Brand has announced that it raised $50 million in Series C funding
- And Tamara Mellon Brand also announced that its sales increased 136% year-over-year growth last year
Tamara Mellon, the founder of the Jimmy Choo brand, runs a direct-to-consumer women’s luxury footwear company under the name Tamara Mellon Brand. And recently, the Tamara Mellon Brand raised $50 million in Series C funding.
This round of funding was led by London-based investment company Centricus. Existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Paris-based Quadrille Capital also joined the round. Including this round, Tamara Mellon Brand has raised about $87 million.
The $50 million Series C round of funding makes it one of the largest for a female-founded fashion company. With this round of funding, Tamara Mellon plans to invest in manufacturing innovation, retail expansion, and brand growth. Plus the company plans to increase the team size from 40 to 60 employees by the end of the year.
Tamara Mellon Brand founders Mellon and Jill Layfield have years of experience in the fashion and retail industry. Mellon was a director at Revlon, the chief creative officer and founder of Jimmy Choo, an accessories editor at Vogue, and editorial at Mirabella Magazine in the late 1980s. And Layfield quickly moved up the rankings at Backcountry.com starting with the director of customer marketing in 2004 until the president and CEO role in 2015.
“Tamara and I are thrilled to have Centricus join our impressive group of investors,” said Layfield. “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.”
The Tamara Mellon Brand saw tremendous growth last year as its sales increased 136% year-over-year and 36% of that figure came from repeat customers. Plus the company had its first $1 million sales day in October 2018. And the company saw mobile traffic grow to more than 80%. Another milestone is that Tamara Mellon Brand was one of the first to integrate with Apple Business Chat.
“We are pleased to be supporting Tamara, Jill and their exceptional team at this crucial stage of Tamara Mellon Brand’s development,” added Centricus co-founder Nizar Al-Bassam. “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.”
Tamara Mellon opened its first brick-and-mortar location in Los Angeles at Palisades Village late last year. The store was designed to look like a shoe closet as each shoe style is displayed in every size and it features “Instagram-worthy shoe walls” which customers can use for trying on products at their leisure.
At the beginning of 2019, Tamara Mellon Brand also launched handbags and sneakers. And from the direct-to-consumer perspective, the brand is eliminating the 6x retail markup. And it is also ignoring the fashion calendar with weekly product drops. Tamara Mellon shoes are made in Italian factories and the brand is offering a complimentary cobbler service for two years after purchasing them.
Featured image credit: Tamara Mellon
