lyst 85m 700mlundentechcrunch: Lyst, the British fashion site, just raised $85 million in funding in a pre-IPO round. The company is expected to go public soon. Lyst is a good company with a lot of potential for growth. It can be profitable without advertising and its website is easy to use with great design.
And it’s not just for women. According to Lyst, more than 20 percent of its sales come from Lyst’s “menswear” category, which includes more than 23,000 products currently.
The online fashion retail site also has a strong international reach, with 30 percent of its customers coming from the U.S., 30 percent from Europe and 25 percent from Asia. Despite its international audience, the company is still headquartered in London rather than Silicon Valley or New York City.
This raises a question: if the company is profitable, why does it need funding?
Investors are probably afraid of missing out on some of the huge growth that the site has seen since its founding in 2008, when it raised just $1.5 million in funding. So far, Lyst has grown by more than 10 percent each year and is expected to reach $2 billion in sales this year alone. It’s also added more than 100 employees over the last two years and plans to hire even more in 2017.
By adding only 15 new products to its site in 2016, Lyst has already outgrown the number of products available in its three most popular categories, which are women’s intimates, women’s outerwear, and men’s accessories.
Lyst claims that it had more than 1.5 million unique visitors across all of its categories in November 2016. About 11 percent of those visitors were from outside the U.S., almost 9 percent came from the U.K., and about 23 percent came from Europe overall.