Luxe.CO Completes Another Round of VC Financing

Luxe.CO completed another round of VC financing in May 2020, led by Borchid Capital. As an Internet start-up, Luxe.CO is building a unique platform to empower the fashion industry by connecting fashion, technology, and financial forces in China and overseas, increasingly benefiting a larger number of users with a solid and ever-growing knowledge base, data intelligence, and a comprehensive industry network. Luxe.CO started as a fashion business media platform and has gradually built up five core business units:

Business Media

Since its inception in 2013, Luxe.CO has been dedicated to creating high-quality content for professionals in the industry based on capturing industry development trends, and covering the global fashion industry in the areas of business, finance and technology.

Luxe.CO views the basis of the fashion industry as a series of "brands", which are constantly created, inherited, updated, and closely connected with generations of fashion consumers. According to Alicia Yu, the Founder of Luxe.CO, "More than 2,000 global brands are recorded in Luxe.CO's brand database, among which more than 50 percent have been introduced to Chinese audiences for the first time. In the future, Luxe.CO aims to cover tens of thousands of brands around the world." She continues to say that "Anyone who wants to truly understand the fashion industry should learn about the business model, marketing, retail, and creative details of brands of different categories."

Luxe.CO App

Entrepreneurial Innovation Service

Luxe.CO has successfully hosted its annual “InnoBrand” Competition since 2015, providing a stage to showcase budding fashion entrepreneurs. More than 400 new fashion and technology projects from home and abroad have applied for a place in the contest for five consecutive years, including many of the most interesting fashion start-up projects in China, and more than 30 percent of them have secured venture financing.

Fashion Business Education

Luxe.CO founded Orange Bay University in 2017 in order to combine international business education in the Chinese fashion industry with pioneering entrepreneurial training. The University’s aim is to build a world-leading fashion business education platform with a strong learning community to cultivate entrepreneurs, investors and excellent leaders and management talent for the fashion industry.

To date, Orange Bay University has conducted five rounds of an executive education program, three sessions of a short program and two Overseas Study Tours. A total of almost 600 hours of classroom teaching have been completed, 77 instructors and guest-speakers have appeared on stage, over 100 fashion business cases have been taught, and more than 20 lectures have been given.

Strategic Consulting Services

China is rapidly being transformed into a "fashion powerhouse". On this upward path, Chinese entrepreneurs and investors are in urgent need of in-depth, detailed, and systematic industry research and strategic guidance. This is why Luxe.CO’s business consulting service product, "Luxe.CO Intelligence", came into being. Luxe.CO Intelligence provides strategic consulting services to industry leaders with a focus on luxury, fashion, beauty and lifestyle industries, based on structured business information, systematic industry research, efficient first-hand research and practical cases.

Luxe.CO has taken its online and offline platforms to a global scale with the following achievements:

• Bringing together information and observations about China's fashion industry to a global audience on its English website, en.luxe.co;
• Posting the "Luxe.CO Global Fashion Innovation and Investment Forum" in Beijing, New York, London, and Milan;
• Participating in the major international fashion weeks like MICAM Milano, Pitti Uomo, Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Cosme Tokyo, China International Import Expo and other events that are focused on expanding industry resources;
• Co-hosting the “China Fashion Forum” with Business France in Paris to introduce the fashion industry chain and market structure through a Chinese lens to French fashion circles;
• Holding an "Italian Fashion Study Week", and establishing teaching and research cooperation initiatives with the Polytechnic University of Milan, IED Istituto Europeo di Design and the Richemont Group.

Luxe.Co Global Forum

Orange Bay University Italian Fashion Study Week, 2019

About Orchid Capital:  The portfolio of Borchid Capital is connected with Luxe.CO in many different ways via a series of early-stage investments in fashion and lifestyle start-ups: the trendy toy retailer, POP MART (Luxe.CO roadshow brand in 2014), the modern Chinese inner wear/lifestyle brand, NEIWAI (2015 Luxe.CO “InnoBrand” excellent brand) and the pet product brand, pidan (2017 Luxe.CO “InnoBrand” champion).

Despite the heart-wrenching start to 2020, luxury, fashion and lifestyle companies in China and abroad have withstood the disaster with great resilience and are gearing up for a recovery. As Alicia Yu says, “No matter how the world changes, people's yearning for a better life will not change. Looking into the future, the fashion industry is still a sunrise industry. As the global fashion industry steps out of the shadow of the epidemic, Luxe.CO will be ready to bring China and the global fashion forces closer together.”

| Photo Credit: Luxe.CO

| Editor: Maier