Lyst, the fashion marketplace once valued at $700M, sells to Japan’s Zozo for $154M

Summary

Fashion goes in and out of style, and so, it turns out, do fashion startups. Lyst — the high-end fashion marketplace with 160 million users that was once valued at $700 million — has been acquired for just $154 million in an all-cash deal. The buyer is Zozo, a Japan-based fashion and e-commerce business. Zozo owns a number of fashion brands that include Wear by Zozo, along with several others with names like Zozotown and Zozosuit. (But you might better know the name for another reason. Its founder Yusaku Maezawa once claimed the title of “most retweeted tweet“, when the platform was still Twitter, when he promised to give away 100 million yen in cash for retweeting it. Vague-hacking reminiscent of Elon Musk, who Maezawa was, coincidentally, also paying to shoot up in a SpaceX rocket.) Zozo said it will continue to operate UK-based Lyst as a standalone business as part of that stable. Current Lyst CEO Emma McFerran will stay with the company. The acquisition — at a massively reduced price compared to Lyst’s last valuation — is coming at a time of strong uncertainty in the world of e-commerce. Lyst specifically was facing headwinds from three different directions. First, U.S. tariff hikes are raising questions around how global trade will look in the coming months and years, including the impact on smaller companies outside the U.S. selling goods to U.S. consumers but equally the ripple effect on trading between other countries and regions. Nearly one-third of London-based Lyst’s revenues currently come from sales in the U.S. Second, even before those tariffs became an issue, Lyst was facing massive competition in online fashion not just from other specialist players but also behemoths like Amazon and Temu. Third, technology investors today have over-indexed massively on anything and everything to do with artificial intelligence. That has put a lot of pressure on companies not in that space to show similar growth trajectories, plus growth stories that somehow incorpor...