Another week and another retail offering gets ready to IPO, but is it good value?
The IPO of Footasylum sees a return to the stock market for the co-founders of high flying JD Sports. The UK based lifestyle fashion retailer is predominantly aimed at fashion-conscious 16 to 24 year-olds and therefore appears to be competing head-on with the likes of ASOS and boohoo.com, to name but a few. We think there is enough of a differentiator to make this look interesting. Read on here..
Footasylum was founded in 2005 by David Makin, one of the co-founders of JD Sports (the ‘D’ in JD) . The first Footasylum store was launched in 2007 and fellow JD Sports founder John Wardle (the ‘J’) joined the business as CEO in 2009. Mr Makin’s daughter Clare Nesbitt joined in 2010 and was appointed CEO in 2016 with Mr Wardle moving to Executive Chairman. Despite the fantastic retailing pedigree, this management musical chairs is a slight concern to us with Mr Wardle also due to retire in June 2018 (he is 72, so we don’t blame him!) when Barry…