Matchesfashion to open new office in Bristol on city's tech reputation

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
Feb 26, 2020

Describing Bristol as a tech hub, luxury fashion retailer Matchesfashion has announced plans to open a new office in the city, and hire about 70 employees as part of the process.

The company is also set to welcome its new chief executive officer, Ajay Kavan, next month. Kavan was previously vice-president of international special projects at Amazon, and his remit at Matchesfashion will be to focus on helping scale the business. The company operates three bricks-and-mortar stores, but its online channel accounts for nearly 95% of sales.

According to Business Live, the new office in Bristol will launch later this year.

Dan Knight, chief technology officer at Matchesfashion, said: “The speed of our development in Bristol is completely dependent on how quickly we can recruit the technology roles we need. Recruitment and interviews have already started and, by summer, we should have an initial team of 10 in place, from which we will build the hub.

“We chose Bristol because of its rapidly growing technology community, world-class centres of education and great quality of life. Our new team here will be pivotal to future development.”

Founded in Wimbledon over 30 years ago, Matchesfashion is one of Britain’s top luxury ecommerce players, rivalling the likes of Net-A-Porter and Farfetch. In the year to January 2019, the business achieved sales of £372 million, up 27% year-on-year.