The lines between streetwear and luxury fashion have blurred in recent years, especially as excitement around sneaker brands like Yeezy and Off-White has soared.
A marriage between a luxury fashion marketplace and a sneaker and streetwear reseller seems like a natural way to wrap up M&A in 2018. With that said, Farfetch has acquired New York-based Stadium Goods, opting to pay $250 million for the sneaker startup in a combination of cash and Farfetch stock. Headquartered in London, Farfetch went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September, pricing its shares at $20 apiece and raising $885 million in the process.
What’s more impressive is Stadium Goods’ journey to exit. The company, which sells new and deadstock products online and in a brick-and-mortar store in New York’s Soho neighborhood, was founded in 2015 by John McPheters and Jed Stiller and had only raised $4.6 million in venture capital funding from Forerunner Ventures, The Chernin Group and Mark Cuban, who is an advisor to the startup.
“There was a time not that long ago when you couldn’t wear sneakers and streetwear to nightclubs and restaurants,” McPheters, Stadium Goods’ chief executive officer, told TechCrunch. “But adoption of the stuff we are selling has continued to grow at a very large clip.”
The sale to Farfetch not only provides a major boost to the sneaker tech ecosystem, which is surprisingly much larger than those who aren’t familiar with it might have guessed, but its yet another successful e-commerce exit for Kirsten Green, the founding partner of Forerunner Ventures, who’s also backed Dollar Shave Club and Bonobos — direct-to-consumer retailers that sold for $1 billion and $310 million, respectively.
Stadium Goods founders John McPheters (left) and Jed Stiller.
Farfetch boarded the sneaker and streetwear hype train a while ago when it incorporated brands like Nike’s Jordan, some of which sell for more than $1,000 on the site. The company doubled down on sneakers earlier this year when it began integrating Stadium Goods products. After noticing high-demand, Farfetch founder and CEO José Neves tells TechCrunch, they began acquisition talks with the startup. Stadium Goods will remain independent as part of the deal, with McPheters and Stiller staying on to lead the brand forward. The company’s portfolio of shoes and apparel will be fully available on Farfetch’s e-commerce platform in the coming months.
“Luxury streetwear is a significant part of our business,” Neves said. “For many years now, we have had the largest collection of Off-White, for example, on the internet … What we did not have was the resale, secondary market. It was clear this was an interesting opportunity.”
Together, Farfetch and Stadium Goods will focus on international growth. McPheters tells TechCrunch Stadium Goods already had a significant international base of customers, but a partnership with Farfetch gives them the tools to go places they’ve never been before.
“In my mind, we are only just beginning,” McPheters said. “As more and more customers get comfortable with purchasing aftermarket items, we are going to continue to grow.”
The global athletic footwear industry is expected to be worth $95 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, sneaker resale is a $1 billion market and growing, fueled by a cohort of startups making it easier than ever for sneakerheads to locate rare shoes online and have them delivered to their doorsteps. That includes Stadium Goods, Flight Club, GOAT and StockX.
All four of these resellers, which ensure authentication of their products, are backed by VCs. Flight Club merged with GOAT earlier this year and together the pair raised a $60 million Series C. Before that, GOAT had brought in $30 million for its secondary market for collectible shoes from Accel, Upfront Ventures, Matrix Partners and more. StockX, for its part, has raised just over $50 million from Mark Wahlberg, Scooter Braun, Wale, Eminem, SV Angel and others.
According to Crunchbase data, VCs have funneled more than $200 million into sneaker startups in the past two years. Now, given the size of Stadium Goods’ exit, investment in the space will likely pick up significantly as other VCs hope to land an exit multiple that substantial.
Whether the reselling market will continue to expand is in question. Some have called it a bubble poised to burst, claiming it’s at its “height in popularity.” Why? Because corporate shoe brands like Nike and Adidas are keenly aware of the secondary market for their products and how they, too, can profit from it. If they decide to increase the supply of particular shoe models hot on the secondary market, they can radically disrupt the reseller economy. McPheters, however, says this doesn’t concern him.
“Brands need to strangle the demand to keep driving excitement in the space,” McPheters said. “They count on that hype to really move the needle.”
Source: TechCrunch
Today only, double up on donuts: a buck buys you a dozen when you buy another dozen.
Source: CNET
Let your smart speaker help you shop.
Source: CNET
Caught up in partisan bickering, Congress didn’t dig into the big issues.
Source: CNET
Oracle filed suit in federal court last week alleging yet again that the decade-long $10 billion Pentagon JEDI contract with its single-vendor award is unfair and illegal. The complaint, which has been sealed at Oracle’s request, is available in the public record with redactions.
If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same argument the company used when it filed a similar complaint with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last August. The GAO ruled against Oracle last month stating, “…the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows.”
That hasn’t stopped Oracle from trying one more time, this time filing suit in the United States Court of Federal Claims this week, alleging pretty much the same thing it did with the GAO, that the process was unfair and violated federal procurement law.
Oracle Senior Vice President, Ken Glueck reiterated this point in a statement to TechCrunch. “The technology industry is innovating around next generation cloud at an unprecedented pace and JEDI as currently envisioned virtually assures DoD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more. The single-award approach is contrary to well established procurement requirements and is out of sync with industry’s multi-cloud strategy, which promotes constant competition, fosters rapid innovation and lowers prices,” he said echoing the language in the complaint.
The JEDI contract process is about determining the cloud strategy for the Department of Defense for the next decade, but it’s important to point out that even though it is framed as a 10 year contract, it has been designed with several opt out points for DOD with an initial two year option, two three year options and a final two year option, leaving open the possibility it might never go the full 10 years.
Oracle has complained for months that it believes the contract has been written to favor the industry leader, Amazon Web Services. Company co-CEO Safra Catz even complained directly to the president in April, before the RFP process even started. IBM filed a similar protest in October citing many of the same arguments. Oracle’s federal court complaint filing cites the IBM complaint and language from other bidders including Google (which has since withdrawn from the process) and Microsoft that supports their point that a multi-vendor solution would make more sense.
The Department of Justice, which represents the US government in the complaint, declined to comment.
The DOD also indicated it wouldn’t comment on pending litigation, but in September spokesperson Heather Babb told TechCrunch that the contract RFP was not written to favor any vendor in advance. “The JEDI Cloud final RFP reflects the unique and critical needs of DOD, employing the best practices of competitive pricing and security. No vendors have been pre-selected,” she said at the time.
That hasn’t stopped Oracle from continually complaining about the process to whoever would listen. This time they have literally made a federal case out of it. The lawsuit is only the latest move by the company. It’s worth pointing out that the RFP process closed in October and a winner won’t be chosen until April. In other words, they appear to be assuming they will lose before the vendor selection process is even completed.
Source: TechCrunch
An analysis of 36 years of snowpack shows that the US’s peaks are shrinking, and that means more wildfires, less drinking water … and less skiing.
Source: Wired
The VPN industry sucks. Dozens of companies promise you the impossible dream of perfect privacy. But it’s simply a big lie. A company called Confirmed VPN wants to change that by holding VPN companies accountable.
VPN companies let you establish an encrypted tunnel between your device and a server in a data center somewhere. While nobody can see what’s inside the tunnel, the VPN company can see everything on their servers.
Many shady companies use that to analyze your browsing habits, sell them to advertisers, inject their own ads on non-secure pages or steal your identity. The worst of them can hand to authorities a ton of data about your online life.
They lie in privacy policies and often don’t even have an About page with the names of people working for those companies. They spend a ton of money buying reviews and endorsements.
Don’t trust any of them.
In other words, VPN services don’t make you more secure on the internet. Install HTTPS Everywhere, install an ad blocker and change your DNS settings to Quad9 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1. Those are better steps to secure your connection.
Now that I got that out of the way, Confirmed VPN is yet another VPN service that wants to try something new. The team behind it (Duet Display’s Rahul Dewan and former iCloud engineer Johnny Lin) has open-sourced the code of its clients and server-side components. It then automatically deploys new commits on Amazon Web Services.
The company uses AWS CloudWatch to monitor unusual activity on the server to prove that they’re not downloading logs or anything like that. Security experts can also log into AWS using read-only credentials. Confirmed VPN has also completed two security audits and has a bug bounty program.
I’m not a security expert, so I can’t endorse or recommend Confirmed VPN — remember, I still think you shouldn’t use a VPN service. But this transparent approach is interesting by itself. Now let’s see how competitors react.
Source: TechCrunch
Mozilla officially launched Firefox 64 by placing new features into the laps of its users including new tab management abilities, intelligent suggestions, and a task manager for keeping Firefox’s power consumption under control.
The post Firefox 64 helps keep your numerous tabs under control appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
The Google Play Store is receiving an update today that will allow customers to make charitable donations to nonprofits from their Android device. While it may seem odd to to be rallying for support for charities within the same marketplace where users download apps and games, it’s not uncommon. Apple for years has collected donations for the American Red Cross in the wake of natural disaster like the California wildfires hurricanes, for example.
Google’s implementation, however, isn’t a launch tied to a single event. And it’s rolling out support for several charities, not just the Red Cross.
Users in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Taiwan and Indonesia will soon see the option to make a donation to a number of organizations, including also charity:water, Doctors Without Borders USA, Girls Who code, International Rescue Committee, Room to Red, Save the Children, UNICEF, World Food Program USA, and World Wildlife Fund US, in addition to the American Red Cross.
To access the feature Android users canb head to play.google.com/donate to read about the organizations or to make a donation using the payment card they have on file for the Play Store.
To be clear, this is about the Play Store itself collecting charitable donations, not allowing Android app developers to do so. Google Play is covering all the transaction and disbursement costs, so the organizations receive 100 percent of the user’s donation.
The feature’s launch has been timed with the holiday season, which often inspires charitable giving. It’s also a sort of belated nod to Giving Week 2018, the movement which encourages people to volunteer, fundraise and donate to worthy causes. (Giving Week this year wrapped on December 5).
The donations feature may offer a different selection of nonprofits in the future, we understand, though Google is not announcing any planned additions at this time.
Google says the feature will begin to roll out to Android users in the supported markets over the next few days.
Source: TechCrunch
Nearly five years after announcing its acquisition of Oculus VR, Facebook is finally ready to put behind it the drama surrounding its founding.
Gaming giant ZeniMax Media’s lawsuit against Facebook over the misuse of intellectual property related to the founding of Oculus VR has finally been settled.
In a statement, ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman confirmed the settlement, saying, “We are pleased that a settlement has been reached and are fully satisfied by the outcome. While we dislike litigation, we will always vigorously defend against any infringement or misappropriation of our intellectual property by third parties.”
At the trial’s conclusion, the judge awarded ZeniMax $500 million in damages to be paid by the defendants, including Facebook and some of the Oculus VR co-founders, a figure that Facebook appealed and had reduced to $250 million. Following the initial verdict, ZeniMax sought an injunction on sales of Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset, claiming the device violated key IP. Terms of this settlement weren’t disclosed.
The trial was notable in that it offered a rare moment on the stand for a number of Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It also gave rare insight into the details surrounding the company’s founding and acquisition.
“We’re pleased to put this behind us and continue building the future of VR,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Source: TechCrunch