About You

About You SE & Co. KG (stylized as ABOUT YOU) is a German fashion online retailer based in Hamburg. Founded in 2014 as a subsidiary of Otto Group, in 2018 its status changed to that of a portfolio company due to a shift in the shareholder balance. Besides Germany, the retailer is active in 24 European countries. The private label Edited is also sold in traditional retail stores. About You focuses primarily on personalization and influencer marketing. In 2018, the company was ranked as the fifth largest online fashion retailers in the country. It is also Hamburg's first non-listed digital startup company with a company valuation of more than one billion US dollars." History About You was launched in Germany on May 5, 2014. The company emerged from Collins (an allusion to American management expert Jim Collins and his book "Built to last"), an e-commerce project financed and overseen by the Otto Group, which invested a three-digit million amount in the project. Founders and managers were Benjamin Otto, Tarek Müller, Sebastian Betz und Hannes Wiese. Benjamin Otto is the son of Otto Group chairman Michael Otto; he left Collins in 2015 to become managing partner at the Otto Group. Hannes Wiese was the former head of the Otto Group'''s strategy department, while Betz and Müller were independent entrepreneurs whose former companies were acquired by the Otto Group. Before starting Collins, Tarek Müller had already attained some prominence in Germany as a young serial entrepreneur, having developed his first income-generating website at the age of 13.About You webshops were launched in Austria and Switzerland (2015), the Netherlands and Belgium (2017), Poland and the Czech Republic (2018), Hungary, Slovakia and Romania (2019), Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Croatia (2020). In 2016, the investment firms SevenVentures, a subsidiary of the German media company ProSiebenSat.1 Media, and German Media Pool bought a minority stake in the company. Three years after its founding, the investors valued About You at more than 300 million euros. In July 2018, the Danish company Heartland A/S, parent of the Bestseller clothing company, acquired a 29 % stake in About You. In this context, About You was valued at over one billion dollars, making the online retailer the first Hamburg-based unicorn. Otto, though still owning the largest share of the company, now held less than 50%, and About You was deconsolidated.