Italian casualwear and jeans maker Diesel‘s founder, Renzo Rosso, through its investment company Rosso Red Circle Investments, acquired a stake in U-Booker, a startup born one year ago which has been developing a web platform able to mach supply and demand of fashion models around the world, Il Corriere della Sera wrote.
Mr. Rosso joints as in U-Booker’s capital the four founders who are models Diana Gaertner and Claudia Wagner, Italian fashion entrepreneur Nicola Scagnolari and product developer expert Andrea Losso. Together with Red Circle, invested in U-Booker also Stefano Martinetto, founder and ceo of Tomorrow London Holding, which in turn has Red Cicle Investments among its shareholders.
U-Booker retains a 10% commission out from models’ fee (versus a 20-30% average by fashion agencies in the US) and another 10% from coporate clients. Models are not linked to any contract with the platform.
Red Circle Investments was one the first investors in Italian fashion e-commerce platform Yoox and is still one of the major shareholders after the merger with French group Net-à-porter. Other companies in Red Cicle’s portfolios are Italian startup incubator H-Farm, Depop (an e-commerce app for mobile devices mostly used by fashion addicts) and EcorNaturaSì (the Italian major producer and distributor of natural and organic products).
