In a dramatic twist, the once-celebrated husband-and-wife team behind FashionValet has thrown in the towel, after a trail of losses and much-talked about investments by state funds that have left many angry.
Fadza Anuar and Vivy Yusof, co-founders of the fashion company which they say is going through a turnaround, announced their resignation, taking full responsibility for a failed expansion that’s left Khazanah Nasional and Perbadanan Nasional Berhad (PNB) sustaining losses.
Both invested a combined RM47 million in FashionValet. Khazanah contributed RM27 million while PNB gave RM20 million to acquire minority stakes.
News broke recently that both have sold off their shares in FashionValet and received a meagre RM3.1 million from the sale.
The Ministry of Finance (MOF) had said the sale is a “responsible exit” for both investing arms.
In a statement released in their “personal capacity”, Vivy and Fadza admitted to “failing” their investors and expressed deep regret for the fiasco that’s unfolded since their aggressive growth plans came to a grinding halt.
“The buck stops with us and the fact is that we failed our investors.”
According to them, the company’s ambitions simply ran too hot.
Driven by a vision to dominate the Southeast Asian market, they poured millions into expanding their technology infrastructure, bulked up their team, and rolled out multiple retail locations.
It was an all-out gamble that assumed continued growth, but as the pandemic hit in 2020 and consumer behaviour shifted, FashionValet found itself overexposed and hemorrhaging cash.
Faced with the dire financial reality, Vivy and Fadza said they took drastic steps to contain costs, even shutting down their own e-commerce platform in a last-ditch effort to conserve cash.
But by then, it was too late.
“The situation had become dire,” she admitted.
Attention had turned to the two high-profile investors who put their faith—and considerable financial backing—into FashionValet: Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah, and state investment firm PNB.
The co-founders, while emphasizing the professionalism of their investors, expressed regret for the controversy and disappointment their decisions have caused.
They hope their experience doesn’t deter Khazanah and PNB from supporting other local startups, though investors may well be wary of repeating the same mistakes.
The resignation of Fadza and Vivy marks the end of an era for FashionValet, a brand that once thrived on the founders’ personal brand and the aspirational story they sold to Malaysia’s rising middle class.
However, their “positive and hopeful face to the world,” as they described it, may have also blinded them to the realities facing their business.
“There are so many things we wish we had done differently,” Vivy and Fadza admitted, acknowledging a string of miscalculations that contributed to the company’s downward spiral.
The statement tonight, posted on both their Instagram, comes after Vivy took to Instagram Stories, saying she was dealing with hospitalization at the moment without elaborating on what ails her.
