Next snaps up a 25% stake in upmarket fashion brand Reiss for £33m

Next has bought a 25 per cent stake in upmarket fashion brand Reiss.

The UK’s largest clothing retail chain will pay £33million for the holding and lend Reiss a further £10million to help it recover from the pandemic.

Next has the option to buy an additional 26 per cent for a slightly higher price any time before July 2022 – handing it a 51 per cent stake and control of the company.

Next, which is the UK’s largest clothing retail chain, will pay £33m for 25 per cent stake in upmarket fashion brand Reiss and a further £10m to help it recover from the pandemic

The deal reunites Next chief executive Lord Wolfson with Reiss boss Christos Angelides, who worked for Next for 28 years before leaving in 2016. Angelides will stay on as boss of Reiss.

Next already stocks Reiss clothes on its website and the deal will see Reiss’s online operations move to Next’s Total Platform.

Wolfson said: ‘Reiss is an outstanding brand with enormous potential and a first class management team. 

We are excited to see what can be achieved Reiss, which counts Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden and the Duchess of Cambridge as fans, was put up for sale by its US private equity owners, Warburg Pincus, before the pandemic.

Its first store, selling men’s clothes, was opened in London’s Bishopsgate in 1971.

The company moved into women’s clothing and accessories in the early 2000s, and now operates from 183 stores and concessions in 14 countries. 

The chain has previously said photos of Kate Middleton wearing a white £159 Reiss dress for her official engagement portrait in 2010 sent the brand to ‘stratospheric’ new heights.

But it has struggled in the pandemic as customers swapped its signature suits and tailoring for jogging bottoms, and commuters and tourists deserted its city centre locations.