About You

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ABOUT YOU GmbH

logo
legal form Company with limited liability
founding 2014
Seat Hamburg , GermanyGermanyGermany 
management Tarek Müller , Sebastian Betz, Hannes Wiese
Number of employees > 500
sales 461 million euros (financial year 2018/19)
Branch Internet trade: fashion shipping
Website www.aboutyou.de
As of April 12, 2019

The About You GmbH (proper spelling ABOUT YOU ) is a German online retailer for clothing, shoes and accessories based in Hamburg . About You GmbH was founded as a subsidiary of Otto and has been part of the Group's portfolio as an investment company since 2018.

The company operates the German online shops aboutyou.de and edited.de as well as the About-You- Shopping-App and has parallel offers in Austria , Switzerland as well as in the Netherlands , Belgium , Poland , Czech Republic , Slovakia , Slovenia , Hungary and Romania active. The GmbH was established in May 2014; At the same time, the About You brand was registered. About You has been working with influencers since it was founded and sells its own brands as well as third-party brands. The own brand Edited is also offered in stationary retail.

In 2018 About You was one of the five top-selling online retailers in Germany in the clothing segment.

history

About You has been active in Germany since May 5, 2014. The online shop aboutyou.de was created as part of the Collins e-commerce project , which was launched in June 2013 by the Otto Group and today's management. The group invested a three-digit million amount for this. The management of Collins GmbH & Co. KG, which acted as the holding company for the new project, and its subsidiary About You GmbH were taken over by Benjamin Otto , Tarek Müller and Sebastian Betz as well as Hannes Wiese. As part of the founding of Project Collins , the Otto Group took over the digital agencies NetImpact Framework and Creative-Task, which were founded by Müller and Betz, with around 100 employees. The founders Tarek Müller, Sebastian Betz and Hannes Wiese have also been involved in About You GmbH since the transaction. On June 1, 2015, Benjamin Otto left his post as managing director to take on the role of a creative partner at the Otto Group.

The About You web shops went online in Austria and Switzerland in August 2015, in the Netherlands and Belgium in early October 2017, in Poland in early August 2018 and in the Czech Republic on October 9, 2018.

In September 2016, SevenVentures (investment stake by ProSiebenSat.1 Media ) and German Media Pool (Niko Wasch and Aljoscha Kaplan) took a minority stake in the company. Three years after it was founded, the Hamburg company was valued by investors at 320 million euros.

Since November 2017 About You has been offering its e-commerce infrastructure (software for operating web shops) under the name About You Cloud as a licensed product for other high-volume online retailers.

In July 2018, the Danish Heartland A / S based in Aarhus , a holding company of one of the largest European clothing companies, Bestseller A / S , acquired a 29 percent stake in the company as part of a capital increase. In this context, About You was valued at over a billion US dollars, making it Hamburg's first “unicorn” company . Other shareholders in the company are the Otto Group as the largest shareholder, Heartland A / S (with a "double-digit share amount"), SevenVentures, German Media Pool, the three managing directors Tarek Müller, Sebastian Betz and Hannes Wiese as well as Benjamin Otto and Janina Özen- Otto with her Gesellschaft für Handelsbeteiligungen mbH .

About You has also been active in Slovakia and Hungary since the beginning of April 2019. Another online shop for Romania was opened in June 2019.

Business activity

About You target group includes women and men between 18 and 49 years of age. The range of the online shop includes more than 200,000 articles from over 1,200 brands (as of April 2019), including exclusively offered collections. The own brand Edited is offered in the webshop of the same name, in five stationary shops in Germany and Austria and in over 100 partner shops in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark and the Czech Republic.

The most important sales channel is the smartphone app, through which 75% of sales are generated.

marketing

An essential feature of About You's marketing is the close cooperation with influencers , who are called "idols" and who present their own outfits, sometimes also their own collections. In Germany About You is considered one of the pioneers in influencer marketing ; the company works with some well-known models, TV entertainers, actors and musicians, including Stefanie Giesinger , Lena Gercke , Bonnie Strange and Daniel Fuchs, but also with numerous bloggers , Instagramers and YouTubers . In total, there are currently (2019) more than 100 influencers under contract with About You.

Personalization continues to be one of the marketing strategies pursued by the company. The About You webshop generates a personalized newsfeed and personalized product sorting for each customer , based on past purchases, likes from brands, people and product groups as well as purchase probabilities of people with similar profiles.

The company's marketing is regarded as an example of best practice , has already won several awards and has been the subject of a series of analyzes.

Events

The company has been hosting the About You Awards since 2017 . The annual award ceremony for popular social media stars has been broadcast by the TV station ProSieben since 2018 .

In February 2019 About You announced the cooperation with the organizer of the Pangea Festival (from 2019 "About You Pangea Festival"), a music, sports and cultural event in Pütnitz on the Baltic Sea.

Awards

About You has received the Shop Award for the best online shops from the trade magazine Internet World Business several times : 2015 (“Best Online Pureplayer” and “Best of Show”), 2016 (“Best Mobile Shop” and 3rd place in the category “Best online pure player” for edited.de), 2017 and 2018 (each “best online pure player”).

2015, the company received the Innovation Award of trade with which the trade association Germany recognizes the most innovative approaches in the German retail sector, and in 2017 the Retail Technology Award from the EHI Retail Institute in the category "Best Customer Experience".

The working conditions at About You (specifically “Move”, an internally developed flexible and open organizational model for the company's development department) were recognized in 2018 with the New Work Award in the “Young Companies” category from the business network platform XING .

The About You Cloud (software offered as a licensed product for online shops) was awarded the German Excellence Prize in the cloud services category in January 2019 by the German Institute for Service Quality , the DUB entrepreneur magazine and the news channel N-tv .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c About You GmbH, Hamburg. northdata.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c About Us. corporate.aboutyou.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Otto Group remains on course for growth despite difficult market conditions Press release of the Otto Group (ottogroup.com), March 28, 2019
  4. ↑ a b About You becomes the first unicorn from Hamburg. corporate.aboutyou.de, July 19, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  5. ↑ About You. Trademark registration information. register.dpma.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Own Labels. corporate.aboutyou.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Edited. Trademark registration information. register.dpma.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  8. ↑ a b Stores & Retailers. edited.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Edited. Trademark registration information. register.dpma.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Online shops with the highest turnover in the clothing segment in Germany 2018 (in million euros). statista.com, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Collins on Plan. The Otto Group's fashion start-up takes stock. corporate.aboutyou.de, September 18, 2014, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Charlotte Schnitzspahn: Recommendations are our growth engine . Ed .: Textile Industry. No. 21 . Deutscher Fachverlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main May 25, 2017, p. 22-23 .
  13. ↑ Hamburger Abendblatt - Hamburg: Otto Group reveals the secret of the million dollar project "Collins" . ( Abendblatt.de [accessed December 28, 2017]).
  14. ^ Collins GmbH & Co. KG, Hamburg. northdata.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  15. ↑ About You GmbH, extract from the commercial register. online-handelsregister.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Stephan Randler: Project Collins Benjamin Otto says goodbye as CEO. neuhandeln.de, April 20, 2015, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Christoph Kapalschinski: About You boss Tarek Müller: "When it comes to fashion, we are better than Zalando or Amazon". handelsblatt.com, October 19, 2015, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  18. ^ Charlotte Schnitzspahn: About You: Expansion in Europe. textilwirtschaft.de, July 11, 2017, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Europe's most personal fashion online shop continues to expand: ABOUT YOU online in the Czech Republic. (PDF) corporate.aboutyou.de, October 10, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  20. ↑ Laura Melchior: About You brings SevenVentures and German Media Pool on board. In: internetworld.de. September 1, 2016, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  21. ↑ Christoph Kapalschinski: Otto Group: The secret investors of "About You". handelsblatt.com, June 2, 2016, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  22. ↑ Focus on growth: About You wins SevenVentures and media investor German Media Pool as investors. corporate.aboutyou.de, September 1, 2016, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  23. ↑ About You offers its own e-commerce infrastructure as an API solution. corporate.aboutyou.de, November 23, 2017, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  24. ↑ Jochen G. Fuchs: About You becomes a system provider: What to expect from the new e-commerce system. t3n.de, December 5, 2017, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  25. ↑ About You welcomes its first cloud customer. corporate.aboutyou.de, March 7, 2018, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  26. ↑ Benjamin Otto invests in the fashion company About you. In: Abendblatt.de. January 23, 2018, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  27. ↑ ABOUT YOU online in Slovakia - Europe's fastest growing online shop continues to expand. Retrieved June 24, 2019 .
  28. ↑ About You - Hungary. Retrieved April 9, 2019 (Hungarian).
  29. ↑ About You - Romania. Retrieved July 12, 2019 (Romanian).
  30. ↑ a b Katrin Ried: Disney collection exclusively on About You. wuv.de, February 7, 2019, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  31. ^ Roman Zenner: About You and Zalando - The Tech Analysis. wuv.de, November 27, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  32. ↑ ABOUT YOU and Lena Gercke intensify their collaboration with “LeGer Basics”. corporate.aboutyou.de, October 8, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  33. ↑ Tanja Koch: "The big sizes are more likely to sell out than the small ones". welt.de, August 21, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  34. ↑ Rüdiger Oberschür: About You is expanding influencer marketing. de.fashionnetwork.com, September 3, 2018, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  35. ↑ Claudia Hilker: Influencer Marketing: How Fashion Companies Use German Social Media Stars. focus.de, May 14, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  36. ↑ Andreas Bersch: Influencer Marketing in the Fashion Industry - Interview with Milena-Isabelle Lambart from ABOUT YOU. futurebiz.de, October 26, 2015, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  37. ↑ Franziska Gayek: About You in a big interview about influencer cooperations and social media marketing. styleranking.de, December 18, 2018, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  38. ↑ Verena Gründel: About You launches Girlpower collection with influencers. wuv.de, March 7, 2019, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  39. ↑ Verena Gründel: About You: First influencer collection for men. wuv.de, February 26, 2019, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  40. ↑ Klaus Janke: About You co-founder Tarek Müller: “We are on the first day of a long journey”. absatzwirtschaft.de, November 16, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  41. ↑ Olaf Kolbrück: About You - flexible solutions for happy customers. etailment.de, March 27, 2017, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  42. ↑ Claudia Hilker: Best Practice in Digital Marketing: Adidas, About You, Douglas. hilker-consulting.de, August 20, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  43. ↑ Gabriel Beck: 17 Best Practices for Personalization on the Web. konversionskraft.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  44. ↑ Verena Gründel: 6 reasons for the success of About You. wuv.de, May 17, 2017, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  45. ↑ These are Germany's best online shops. internetworld.de, March 6, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  46. ↑ a b Innovation Award for About You. Einzelhandel.de, November 19, 2015, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  47. ↑ Felix Zimmermann: Onsite Personalization - The Personalization Process and a Possible Approach. webspotting.de, December 19, 2017, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  48. ^ Ingo Böckenholt, Audrey Mehn & Arne Westermann (eds.): Concepts and strategies for omnichannel excellence . Innovative retail marketing with multi-dimensional sales and communication channels. Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden 2018, ISBN 978-3-658-20182-1 , Alexander Bellin: ABOUT YOU - Development of a New Attribution Approach, p. 217-235 ( [1] ).
  49. ↑ Michèle Nemsow: Social Commerce as a Discipline of E-Commerce 2.0. Successful relationship marketing at About You using the example of You & Idol . Thesis. GRIN, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-668-78497-0 ( [2] ).
  50. ↑ Patrick Siegfried (Ed.): Successful Start-ups, Volume 2 . Case studies and work questions - Marley Spoon, Kitchen Stories, shpock, Amorelie, Ankerkraut, Earebel, Little Lunch, About You. AVM Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-86924-989-6 , L. Werner: SWOT analysis of the About You GmbH online shop, p. 205-231 ( [3] ).
  51. ↑ About You Awards. Retrieved April 12, 2019 .
  52. ↑ 20 million euros media value (almost) free: Why About You gives the Influencer Award. omr.com, July 31, 2017, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  53. ↑ These are the biggest social media stars of the year. About You Award 2018. internetworld.de, May 4, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  54. ↑ About You Pangea Festival. Retrieved April 12, 2019 .
  55. ↑ Ingo Rentz: How About You wants to make itself even more independent from classic advertising. horizont.net, February 13, 2019, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  56. ↑ Aboutyou wins the main prize "Best of Show". Shop-Award 2015. internetworld.de, March 24, 2015, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  57. ↑ Martin Gaitzsch: Business Shop Award 2016: these are the winners. onlinehaendler-news.de, March 1, 2016, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  58. ↑ Internet World Business Shop Award 2017 - the winners are ... e-commerce-magazin.de, March 7, 2017, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  59. ↑ These are Germany's best online shops. Shop-Award 2018. internetworld.de, March 6, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  60. ↑ 2017 winners.reta-europe.com, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  61. ↑ These are the winners of the New Work Awards 2018. spielraum.xing.com, March 6, 2018, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  62. ↑ Tech & Development. corporate.aboutyou.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .
  63. ^ German Excellence Award - Prize Winners 2019. deutscherexzellenzpreis.de, accessed on April 12, 2019 .