Ami Paris continues to grow, targets €300 million for 2023

Ami Paris is thriving. The fashion label founded in 2011 by Alexandre Mattiussi recently unveiled its latest collection at Paris Fashion Week Men with actor Vincent Cassel opening the show. The brand has switched to a higher gear in the aftermath of the pandemic, posting exponential revenue growth. Ami Paris’s revenue rose from €35 million in 2019 to €230 million in 2022, and the label is now targeting €300 million for the current year.
 

Ami Paris’s ambitious objective was revealed by Nicolas Santi-Weil, the label’s CEO for the past 10 years, in an interview to Italian business daily MF Fashion, and was confirmed to FashionNetwork.com by the label itself. In 10 years, Santi-Weil has transformed a minor menswear label in a sizeable global brand, adding womenswear to the range and generating most of Ami Paris’s sales outside France.

Santi-Weil’s strategy hinges on managing the label’s e-shop internally, and on prioritising store openings outside the French domestic market. Ami Paris recently left its Marais headquarters and moved to more spacious premises on rue Etienne-Marcel, on the corner with place des Victoires. The label currently employs 500 people. It operates 58 monobrand stores, and is also distributed via 700 independent retailers in over 120 countries, compared to 8 stores and 350 retailers in 2019. Ami Paris is available at most Parisian department stores, but has only two monobrand boutiques in the French capital, one on rue d’Alger, in the Saint-Honoré district, and the other on boulevard Beaumarchais.

Ami Paris’s retail presence is mostly concentrated abroad, notably in Asia, where it operates some 40 stores, 15 of them in Japan and 12 in South Korea. China, its main Asian market, is the country where the label has most expanded its presence, now consisting of 17 stores. Ami Paris entered the Chinese market by opening a first boutique in 2016. In 2021, its expansion in the country accelerated, after Shanghai-based venture capital firm Sequoia Capital China bought a majority stake in the label.

A few months ago, a new investor, London-based firm Felix Capital, became a shareholder in Ami Paris, as Santi-Weil stated in his interview. Santi-Weil himself bought a stake in Ami Paris when he joined the company in 2013. The label did not wish to disclose further details about its shareholders.

Felix Capital is a venture capital firm that was founded in 2015 by former French merchant banker Frédéric Court. Santi-Weil is one of Felix Capital’s original shareholders. The firm is mostly interested in tech start-ups but is also active in the fashion sector, having notably invested in Farfetch and Highsnobiety, from which it later exited. Besides Ami Paris, the firm holds stakes in Canadian jewellery brand Mejuri, in Unmade, a digital developer specialised in fashion industry software, in US label Anine Bing, in make-up company Violette_FR, and in industry news publisher Business of Fashion.