New Guards Group Acquires Ambush and Opening Ceremony Off-White™ and Heron Preston's platform adds the two brands to its portfolio

The Milan-based New Guards Group, the holding company that owns Off-White™, Palm Angels, Marcelo Burlon and Heron Preston, has just acquired majority stakes in Ambush, the Tokyo-based jewellery brand founded by rapper Verbal and Dior's jewel design director Yoon Ahn, and Opening Ceremony, an American streetwear brand created by Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, former Kenzo's creative directors creatives. The two brands were acquired soon after the New Guards Group itself was taken over by Farfetch for 675 million dollars, in a move that, along with the acquisition of Stadium Goods, suggests that Farfetch may soon own an empire rival to those of Kering and LMVH, but focused on the streetwear world.

The platform-partner, with the administrative and financial services it offers, in addition to shared logistics management, has become the ideal model for the development of brands in recent years especially in the perspective of the new luxury, according to which a brand is successful to the extent that it is able to affect the cultural perception of its target, entering into its social dynamics through participatory mechanisms. To accomplish this, those structures and the kind of management that only a platform can provide to a brand are needed. Between the wholesale crisis and the optimisation of distribution logistics that modern customers demand, the capital and infrastructure of platforms such as the New Guards Group have become indispensable for brands that want to grow and extend their operations on a global platform.