UMAR KAMANI co-founded PrettyLittleThingsin 2012, when he was just 24, along with his brother Adam.
Selling womenswear, footwear, accessories and beauty products aimed at the age group 16-24, PLT, as it is also known, gained significant traction when the likes of Miley Cyrus, Michelle Keegan, Rita Ora, Jessie J and Nicki Minaj were all spotted wearing the product range.
Boohoo, the pioneering online fashion retailer started by their father Mahmud Kamani six years ago in 2006, bought a 66 per cent stake in the brand in January 2017. In May 2020, Booohoo once again exercised its option to buy stakes in PLT, and took complete control of the brand, acquiring the remaining 34 per cent in a deal that could be worth up to £324 million.
Umar, who began working in the family business as a manager at Boohoo and started his own venture inspired by its success, would not mind, as the business has grown exponentially since Boohoo’s entry, posting net sales of £516m in the year ending February 29, 2020, compared with £55m in 2017. Adam, meanwhile, has shifted his focus to the family’s property business.
Boohoo has been a standout success story, a result of Mahmud’s foresight when the internet was beginning to transform retail in the early 2000s. Already supplying clothing chains across Europe, he was keen to set up his own label and trade online, where there were fewer overheads and where he could sell more quickly and cheaply directly from the warehouse.
Mahmud, who followed his father into the clothing business, has already built his own brands in Pinstripe, Starsign and Jogo, while supplying to the likes of Primark and New Look, and knew how to create and sustain brands in the sector.
It’s no wonder then that Boohoo, which he launched along with business partner Carol Kane, attracted a valuation of £700million when floated on the Alternative Investment Market in March 2014.
The group has now grown into a multi-brand platform comprising Boohoo, BoohooMAN, PrettyLittleThing, Nasty Gal, MissPap, Karen Millen and Coast, catering to various age groups between 16 and 40.
British fashion brands MissPap, Karen Millen and Coast were acquired in 2019, and Nasty Gal, the US-based super niche brand that Umar bought out of insolvency, joined the stable earlier in 2017.
With an active customer base of 14 million worldwide, the group has enjoyed strong growth of 44 per cent in the year to February 29, 2020, helping it to breach the £1 billion mark in revenue. The company has now truly transformed into a global retailer, as international revenue, up 51 per cent, now accounts for 45 per cent of the total revenue of £1.23 billion.
While clothing retail has been hit hard by the lockdowns and restrictions imposed to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, Boohoo has traded strongly through the pandemic, but the group has been beset with supply chain problems.
After newspaper allegations about working conditions and low pay at factories in Leicester that supply the group, the group commissioned an independent review, and in September 2020, accepted all the recommendations and set out steps to tackle the problems.
Later in November, the group appointed retired judge Brian Leveson, best known for heading a 2012 inquiry into the UK media standards, to independently check its ‘Agenda for Change’ programme.
“We have made some mistakes but over the past 14 years, we’ve got more right than wrong and we’ve a very very fast growing business,” Mahmud says in evidence to the UK parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee, which is examining fashion sustainability. “I’m determined to fix whatever’s gone wrong and I understand things have gone wrong because of the fast growing nature of this business.”
Mahmud added all at the group were “seeking to make a better Boohoo”, while admitting that the group has not been able to develop processes quickly enough to keep up with the group’s growth.
“We recognise in this industry, when we’re dealing with an independent factory who’s not owned by us... some of them don’t play with a straight bat as it were. But we try our best to make good,” he says.
The group had ended relationships with 64 suppliers and factories in Leicester since late 2019 for violating its code of conduct. At the same time, Mahmud has reiterated his commitment to the city, which is estimated to be making around 40 per cent of its clothing.
However, he expressed before the parliamentary committee how he felt of being unfairly singled out for choosing to support the UK manufacturing sector.
“For us to move out of Leicester, it’s very easy for us to take all our production offshore,” he says. “Lots of people in the fashion industry have moved offshore. We are still here and sometimes, sometimes, it feels like we get punished for it, just sometimes.”
Those words have been laden with emotions, for the Kamani family, who arrived in Manchester as part of the 1968 exodus of Asians fleeing Kenya, has grown deep roots in the Midlands. Mahmud’s father Abdullah started out making clothes to sell locally, and the enterprising man, whose family originally hailed from Gujarat, soon was importing from India and Africa.
During the hearing, Mahmud described himself as “a market trader who had been very fortunate” and learnt “the ethics of hard work” from his father. As he presides over one of the world’s fastest growing retailers, his definition of himself is a pretty accurate validation of the old saying that hard work and luck are both directly proportional.
