Case 28 — Subdued · Enrico Maria Sconciaforni and Alessandro Orsini · 2024

Your brand is ready to go global and you have never had an outside shareholder. Do you sell a minority stake to a patient partner, sell control to the highest bidder, or keep doing it alone?

You co-founded a teen fashion brand in Rome thirty years ago and you still own all of it. Last year it did €119.5 million of sales, up 30%, with an EBITDA margin of about 21%. You run 85 stores of your own across Italy, Spain, France, the UK, the German-speaking countries and the Benelux, and you sell almost nothing wholesale. The UK, which you entered only in 2022, is working better than you expected. You want to open in China and the United States, which means new leases, new logistics and new people in markets where you know nobody. You have been approached, through Rothschild, by Nuo, an investment vehicle backed by the Agnelli family's Exor and the Pao family of Hong Kong, which wants a minority stake and has a record of holding Italian mid-sized companies for the long term.

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