Neiman Marcus acquires Mytheresa

By

Bruno Joly

Published
Sep 15, 2014

Neiman Marcus has acquired a bit of German e-commerce for itself. The American group (retailers Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman...) has signed an agreement to acquire Mytheresa.com and its eponymous store in Munich. Founded in 1987 by Christoph and Susanne Botschen, the concept store in the Bavarian capital entered into e-commerce in 2006 with a product range culled from more than 170 designers and labels.

The founders sold a stake of the company managing the website to the investment firm Acton Capital Partners in 2010, while holding onto the store. Together, Theresa, the physical store, and Mytheresa generate about 100 million euros in net sales, two-thirds of which come from abroad (in Europe, the Middle East and Asia). According to Karen Katz, the CEO of Neiman Marcus, the acquisition enables the Dallas-based company to continue to expand internationally. But the statement specifies that the Munich-based organization will stay independent and that its executives, including Thomas Müller, Jens Riewenherm and buying director Justin O’Shea, will remain at their posts. They will now report to Joshua Schulman, president of Bergdorf Goodman.

For the first nine months of its fiscal year, which began in early August 2013, the group saw its total sales increase on a comparable basis by 5.7% to 3.7 billion dollars (2.9 billion euros), for a net loss of 94.5 million.