Farfetch
- 🦄Became a unicorn2015
- 📈Peak valuation$23 Billion ’21
- 💔Became a Unitard2022
- 💸Last valuation~$460M
How it happened
Farfetch was a London-based online marketplace for luxury fashion, connecting hundreds of boutiques with shoppers worldwide — one of Europe's most celebrated tech startups, which reached a roughly $23B market value in early 2021 after its 2018 NYSE IPO. Then losses mounted, COVID hit its key China market, and the stock cratered more than 90%. Glassdoor reviews chart a long slide inside: employees described a two-year pay-and-bonus freeze, waves of layoffs — one round topping 700 people — and offices closed even as staff were pushed back on-site, all atop a bloated, bureaucratic tech org. Many said leadership kept reassuring them about runway just before the December 2023 sale to Coupang for about $500M wiped out their shares.
Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.
Source: Bloomberg / Quartz / Digital Commerce 360 (London-based luxury-fashion marketplace, VC-backed unicorn from ~2015; ~$23B market value at its early-2021 peak; China and Russia shocks plus mounting losses collapsed it; Coupang acquired its assets for ~$500M in Dec 2023, with equity and noteholders recovering nothing)
