Cult Mia, an online fashion marketplace building the leading platform for sustainable and conscious luxury fashion, has raised €2.8 million in seed funding. The round was led by Fuel Ventures, David Wertheimer (a renowned luxury fashion investor funding the new era of luxury), Morgan Stanley (the Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab selected Cult Mia as one of the nine EMEA businesses for this year’s cohort from a global pool of more than 7,900 businesses), WomanKind Ventures (backing exceptional women-led startups), among others.
Founded in October 2019 by female entrepreneur Nina Briance, Cult Mia has developed an unmatched marketplace model over the course of its first four years of business and With an unparalleled gross margin in the top 1 percent in the industry, a return rate 16% below the industry average and a customer acquisition cost 31% more efficient than peers, Cult Mia has laid the foundations to supercharge its growth.
“We’re incredibly excited to have received this investment. This backing points to the future of online luxury platforms lying with distinctive, curated, values-driven fashion. I believe that we have found the leading strategic partners in our space: deep marketplace scaling expertise, unique financial sponsorship and support from the most reputable institutions, and backing from fashion royalty. I’m humbled by this investor line-up and truly energised for the next stages of Cult Mia’s growth journey,” said Nina Briance, Founder and CEO of Cult Mia.
The company will use the investment to further advance automating its platform technology, increase efficiencies in acquiring and retaining customers, while expanding the core team to cover new product and service verticles planned to roll in 2024. Cult Mia’s tech IP has been and will continue to be a significant focus in order to continue putting the platform way ahead of the competition both for brands and shoppers via a product-to-market that is quicker than fast fashion, while guaranteeing sustainability.
“Cult Mia’s sector is one we have been looking at for several months, and we’ve passed on a selection of opportunities where we felt the unit economics were not strong enough or that there was not enough of a USP compared to the existing players. Cult Mia’s long term vision and focus on long-term relationships,
both with the platform’s brands and customers, excites us and speaks to our experience working with marketplaces previously. We’ve watched such significant growth in the luxury marketplace space, but have never really been keen to involve ourselves. Why? Because the majority of companies we’ve seen have had poor margins and the same stock as the major players. We’ve never been convinced that’s a space for us. We really feel like what Cult Mia is building allows us to enter this space with real confidence,” said Mark Pearson, Founder & Managing Partner at Fuel Ventures.
Positioning Cult Mia next to the well-established marketplace peers, the platform takes home more than double the profit per order compared to its competitors. Cult Mia has agility in its curation and doesn’t face inventory risk following the Farfetch marketplace model, but benefits from margins that only wholesale retailers, such as Net-A-Porter, see. The platform has combined the best of both worlds, creating a new business model that the investors, even in the least favourable fundraising conditions, jumped at backing, resulting in an oversubscribed seed round in October.
“We have been impressed by Cult Mia’s attractive platform, providing a high-quality experience to customers from over 42 countries. Cult Mia has built an impressive footprint of over 320 independent brands and partnered with eminent fashion authorities in its first few years. Nina and the team bring a dynamic, values-driven approach to the business and have grown Cult Mia impressively since its founding in 2019,” commented Sanghamitra Karra, Managing Director and EMEA Head of the Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Group.
“We are delighted to have selected Cult Mia as the first investment made by Womankind Ventures. Nina and Cult Mia embody the exact level of robustness we look for; a perfect blend of experience and expertise in the founder expressed in a well designed and executed, high-performing business. Cult Mia is primed for explosive growth and we are thrilled to be a part of this journey,” added Andrea Sommer, Co-Founder and Investment Lead, Womankind Ventures.
