Farfetch needed rescue money before Christmas — Coupang bought it for the bridge loan

Farfetch, founded by Portuguese entrepreneur José Neves and headquartered in London, was the flagship proof that luxury fashion could be sold online: a marketplace connecting the world's boutiques and brands to shoppers everywhere, listed in New York in 2018 and for a while valued like a technology company. The problem was the one luxury marketplaces never solved — the cost of acquiring a luxury customer, the logistics of a global inventory it did not own, and margins too thin to carry either.

By late 2023 the company needed new funding before Christmas or it would not continue. On 18 December 2023 the answer arrived as a rescue: South Korea's Coupang, with Greenoaks Capital, put in a $500 million bridge loan and agreed to take the company private through a pre-pack administration process. The side effects were immediate — Richemont scrapped its agreement to sell part of Yoox Net-A-Porter to Farfetch the moment the Coupang deal became known.

Neves, who had built the company, stayed on in a role still being negotiated with the new owners; Coupang's founder Bom Kim promised 'steady and thoughtful growth' — the exact opposite of the strategy that had produced the emergency. The case is the marketplace model itself: connecting everyone's inventory to everyone's demand is a service the platform charges too little for, because the brands and the boutiques can always threaten to do it themselves. Farfetch proved the demand existed and could not make the proving pay.