Farfetch opens platform to brands

Online fashion marketplace Farfetch is opening its e-commerce platform to luxury fashion brands to trade directly on its website or through their own transactional sites.

The move comes as the online marketplace sets up a new independently-run business unit called Farfetch Black & White, which will offer brand partners operational services such as payments, fraud protection and customer support, alongside access to its logistics network. As well as allowing brands access to deploy localised sites in nine languages and ship to key global markets including China, Japan, Brazil and Russia.

The idea will mean that Farfetch will be in direct competition with the likes of Yoox and Demandware. The first Farfetch-powered e-commerce site are expected to go live in the last quarter of 2016 and early 2016.

“This is a fully-fledged agency and white-label solution for brands, where we can make use of our platform to build another website and then deploy in a modular way whatever services or infrastructure they want to use,” explained José Neves, chief executive and founder of Farfetch to Business of Fashion.

This news follows on from the recent addition of mono-brand boutiques that it has added to its marketplace with brands including Roksanda, AMI, Derek Lam, La Perla, Jason Wu, and Vera Wang taking advantage of the new service.