Member Article

Grant Thornton advises leading digital retailer on international fashion deal

GRANT Thornton UK LLP’s Corporate Finance team has advised fast-growing Australia-based omni-channel clothing retailer City Chic Collective Ltd (CCX) on a strategic acquisition which will increase its footprint in Europe.

City Chic Collective, which last year acquired the long-standing British clothing and footwear brand Evans from the administrators of Arcadia Group, has now bought e-commerce retailer Navabi.

Navabi, was founded in 2009 and sells plus-size women’s clothing, footwear and accessories to customers in Germany, France and the UK.

In 2020 Navabi had 5.8 million of customer traffic to its websites and generated €10.4m in sales revenue. The brand was impacted by the pandemic in 2020, with traffic in prior years exceeding 10 million visits.

Listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, City Chic Collective has paid €6m in cash for the business from its founders, who have now exited. City Chic, which operates primarily online across Australia, US, UK and New Zealand, sees significant strategic value in investing in Navabi as a platform to launch its European entry.

The team at Grant Thornton consisted of Doug Bentley, Nicola Sartori and Nicole Wong. They identified Navabi as a suitable target for City Chic and project managed this cross-border transaction through to completion.

Corporate Finance Director Doug Bentley said: “This is a great outcome for both parties. This was a highly strategic transaction for CCX. It enables the company to continue expanding its geographical footprint and build on the Navabi brand. This acquisition is a great addition to CCX’s portfolio and we are excited to see what the next stage of the journey brings.”

Munraj Dhaliwal, Chief Financial Officer at City Chic added: We have been working with Grant Thornton for a couple of years to map out our entry into the region, and over that time they have advised us on two great opportunistic acquisitions. We will continue to work with them as they have shown an impressive level of insight, deal negotiation and structuring and overall management of the transaction from the first discussion through to completion. They have proved themselves on a number of occasions to give frank advice on price, in our best interest. It also helps that they are very easy to work with.“

Other advisers to City Chic were law firms CMS (Germany) and Thomson Geer (Australia), and PwC (Germany, Australia) on tax.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sarah Jones .