Web boutique CarréCouture relaunches after bankruptcy

Belgian luxury web shop CarréCouture has gone bankrupt after a mere year. The Van Gansewinkel family, known from the waste company and co-owner of this formula, will try to relaunch anyway.

“Haven’t sold anything for days “

Fashion entrepeneur Isabelle Mortier, who founded The Tutu Shop, will help the Van Gansewinkel family to relaunch Carrécouture. The luxury fashion web shop launched in June 2017 and had to become a rival to Farfetch, the British luxury web shop that presents independent designer boutiques’ product range online and is the European market leader.

Those lofty ambitions failed to materialize: the family had a 25 % stake through its investment firm De Raekt cut off funds early this year after employee conversations revealed that there were a lot of problems and very few sales. “Sometimes, we did not sell anything for days”, an employee told De Tijd.

CarréCouture, founded by Jeroen and Nathalie Pompen, only convinced 47 independent fashion stores to join the platform and only 27 actually used the web shop. The guardian said the bankrupted company’s turnover “did not merit that name”. Between its launch and now, it had apparently generated “more than 500,000, but not as much as one million euro” in turnover.

Scale is necessity

Nevertheless, the Van Gansewinkel family still believes in the potential: The Tutu Shop’s Isabelle Dumortier is preparing a relaunch. It will need to gain size as quickly as possible, because that will be crucial to its success. 

Farfetch managed to achieve that: the web shop generates a 170 million euro turnover and has exlusive deals with about 85 % of German luxury boutiques.