How The Founder Of Farfetch Is Politely Reinventing The Boutique For The Digital Age

Then we seek to bestow the highest praise on a new business venture, particularly a new tech business, we call it disruptive, meekly accepting the misery, havoc and sheer unmannerliness the word implies. That’s the price of progress, we say, unless we’ve just been disrupted, in which case we say something else. What word, then, to call José Neves’ Farfetch, the 400 or so fashion boutiques around the world and more than 100 brands, that Neves has stitched together into a globe-girdling e-commerce octopus? New it most certainly is. Nothing quite like it existed before or exists now. But if anything, it’s the opposite of disruptive. Perhaps you could call it ruptive. It appears to empower that most endearing of commercial institutions, the quirky corner merchant, without trying to eat anybody else’s bacon. (Neves does not look kindly upon Uber in London for precisely this reason: it is eating the bacon of his beloved black taxis.) I challenged Neves to explain why I should buy my Orlebar Brown shorts through a California boutique on Farfetch when I have an Orlebar Brown store just round the corner from where I am staying in Notting Hill. Neves was unfazed. So buy it round the corner, he told me cheerily. Read more at The Telegraph.