The Board of Directors of Global Fashion Group (GFG) announced the completion of its merger, an additional EUR 32 million funding round and the appointment of Romain Voog (43) as CEO and Nils Chrestin (34) as CFO.
Romain and Nils will be responsible for the overall strategic and operational development of GFG as well as the various group functions, with the Dafiti, Lamoda, Jabong, Zalora and Namshi management teams continuing to lead the strong regional fashion e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, GFG, under the lead of Romain and Nils, will develop solutions to leverage know-how across the group even better, scale operations and hone its global infrastructure to strengthen its position as the #1 fashion destination for emerging markets.
Romain Voog joins GFG with 13 years of online and offline retail experience and a background as a strategy consultant. He spent the last seven years at Amazon, most recently as the company’s President and Managing Director for France. Prior to Amazon, he spent 6 years at Carrefour in various leadership roles and is a former strategy consultant from Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company in Europe and in Asia. Romain holds a General Engineering Diploma from Ecole Centrale Paris.
Nils Chrestin has spent the last two years as Managing Director and CFO of Lamoda in Moscow prior to becoming GFG’s CFO in January 2015. Prior to his role at Lamoda Nils was a private equity investor at Morgan Stanley Private Equity. Nils has over 10 years of experience and graduated from Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich with a Mathematics Diploma.
“We are delighted to announce the appointment of Romain as GFG’s new CEO. He brings most valuable additional e-commerce expertise to complement the outstanding work performed by our regional leaders. He and Nils will be a great team to drive operational excellence across the various business units”, says Lorenzo Grabau, Chairman of GFG.
“I am thrilled to join GFG as CEO. I look forward to working with our outstanding teams on the next stage of developments of our five regional businesses and to building the leading fashion e-tailer of emerging countries”, says Romain Voog, CEO of Global Fashion Group.
“I very much look forward to working with Romain and our regional management teams to continue driving global best practices, integration and economies of scale across GFG”, says Nils Chrestin, CFO of Global Fashion Group.
In March 2015, Global Fashion Group has received an additional EUR 32 million investment from existing shareholders Tengelmann Ventures and Verlinvest. The investment, completed at the same valuation as the one used for the merger and creation of GFG, implies a post- money valuation of EUR 2.8 billion. Pro forma for the transaction Kinnevik owns 25.4% and Rocket Internet owns 23.0% of the Company.
Source: Global Fashion Group (GFG)
