Tom Chapman (entrepreneur)

Thomas Watson Chapman OBE (born June 1963[1]) is a British entrepreneur and investor.[2]

This article is about the entrepreneur. For the French English musician, see Tom Chapman.

Tom Chapman
OBE
Born
Thomas Watson Chapman

June 1963 (age 57)
Wimbledon, London
NationalityBritish
OccupationBusinessperson, Entrepreneur, Investor
Known forCo-founder of MATCHESFASHION.COM
Net worth GB£455 million (Sunday Times Rich List, 2019)
Spouse(s)Ruth Chapman
Children3

He co-founded luxury fashion online retailer MATCHESFASHION.COM in 1987 and served as the company's co-CEO until 2015.[3] In 2017, Matches was acquired by Apax Partners in a deal that valued the company at $1 billion.[4]

Since 2017, he has been an early-stage investor with an investment portfolio that spans several industries including technology, fashion and medical cannabis.[5][2]

Early life

Born in Wimbledon, Chapman studied hotel and hospitality management before opening an independent fashion outlet.[6]

Career

Matchesfashion.com

In 1987, Chapman founded MATCHESFASHION.COM as a single store in Wimbledon Village.[3] At the age of 21, Chapman met Ruth Chapman and convinced her to join the business.[7] By 2011 MATCHESFASHION.COM was the largest independent fashion retailer in London with 14 stores.[8][3]

In 2007, the company was one of the first luxury brands to go online.[9] Chapman led the company's digital strategy and turned the business into a multi-channel e-commerce retailer.[10][11]

Chapman said the original motivation for launching the website was to provide a single view of the stock as well as build a customer database and was initially surprised by the success of the website as a sales tool.[10] From the launch of the website, the business grew at up to 100 percent per year.[10] As of 2018, the company stocks over 450 brands shipping to 176 countries, making 95 percent of sales online and 85 percent internationally.[12]

In 2011, Chapman launched No. 23, a townhouse dedicated to private shopping to complement online retail.[13] In 2012, the company raised £20 million in venture capital from SEP and Highland Capital Partners at a valuation of £76 million.[14] In 2013, Chapman rebranded all Matches' physical stores MATCHESFASHION.COM to "unify" the brand.[15][9]

In 2016, the company launched 90-minute delivery to shoppers in London.[12] In 2018, the business opened 5 Carlos Place, a five-storey townhouse combining luxury private shopping in a home environment with a broadcasting hub and events space.[16] Chapman was also responsible for introducing iPads into the company’s stores, which accounted for more than 50 percent of in-store sales.[9]

In 2015, Chapman stepped down as joint chief executive to become joint chairman.[3]

MATCHESFASHION.COM was acquired by Apax Partners in 2017.[17] Chapman retains a minority stake in the business and remains on the company board.[7][18]

Investment portfolio

Since 2017, Chapman has invested in multiple startups across a wide range industries in the UK and USA.[19]

Chapman has invested in Seattle-based trucking start-up Convoy; skincare brand Heyday; fashion brand Universal Standard; baby food business Cerebelly; finance company IPSX; consumer personal care 'by Humankind'; feminine hygiene brand OHNE, personal male grooming company Hawthorne; and health-tech company Medopad.[8][20][5][2]

Chapman has also invested in marijuana startups, including Caliva, Plena and US-based medical cannabis company Harvest Health & Recreation.[19][8][5][2]

In February 2020, Chapman invested in CDLP, a Swedish menswear brand.[21]

Personal life

Married to Ruth Chapman, the couple have three children.[22] They have properties in London and Los Angeles, and have two dogs.[23][2]

Chapman collects 20th-century furniture.[9] He is a member of the Innovation Circle at the Serpentine Galleries.[24]

In 2017, Tom Chapman received the Drapers Lifetime Achievement Award.[25] In 2018, Chapman was inducted into the Business of Fashion Hall of Fame.[3]

Tom and Ruth Chapman were both appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to the international fashion retail industry.[26]

gollark: I mean, if my laptop gets hacked or something, people can at least not irreversibly overwrite my brain, only... delete my notes and stuff.
gollark: I'm pretty scared of brain implants because they would probably involve computer systems of some kind with read/write access to my brain. And computers/software seem to have more !!FUN!! security problems every day.
gollark: Personally, I blame websites and the increasingly convoluted web standards for browser performance issues. Websites with a few tens of kilobytes of contents to a page often pull in megabytes of giant CSS and JS libraries for no good reason, and browsers are regularly expected to do a lot of extremely complex things. With Unicode even text rendering is very hard.
gollark: Memory safety issues are especially problematic in things like browsers, so avoiding them is definitely worth something.
gollark: > google blames c/c++ and its lack of warnings to devs about memory issues for most of the critical bugs in chrome<@528315825803755559> I mean, it's a fair criticism. You can avoid them if you have a language (like Rust) which makes them actual compile errors.

References
  1. "Tom CHAPMAN - Personal Appointments (free information from Companies House)". beta.companieshouse.gov.uk. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  2. Evans, Peter (22 September 2019). "Q&A with angel investor Tom Chapman". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0956-1382. Retrieved 23 September 2019.
  3. "Tom & Ruth Chapman Are Among the 500 People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry". The Business of Fashion. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  4. Paton, Elizabeth (1 September 2017). "Matchesfashion.com Sells Majority Stake to Apax After Fierce Bidding War". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  5. "Tom Chapman". THE MARQUE. Retrieved 5 September 2019.
  6. "Harper's Bazaar: Perfect Match". www.pressreader.com. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  7. December 2017, 15. "Drapers Top 100 2017 – 24. Tom and Ruth Chapman, founders, Matchesfashion". Drapers. Retrieved 14 February 2019.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  8. "Tom Chapman - Founder @ Matches Fashion". Crunchbase. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  9. Lisa Armstrong, Head of Fashion. "Ruth and Tom Chapman on turning Matches into a multimillion-pound empire from one tiny shop". The Telegraph. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  10. Stocker, 1 July 2011By Keely. "Tom Chapman". Drapers. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  11. Smith, Edwin (12 July 2015). "MatchesFashion duo step back after successful shift to online sales". ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  12. Butler, Sarah; Wood, Zoe (1 September 2017). "Husband and wife bank £400m from sale of Matchesfashion.com". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  13. "Matchesfashion plans standalone store for Raey". The Industry. 1 January 2017. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  14. "Drive Episode 6: Tom Chapman on Building MatchesFashion". The Business of Fashion. 26 October 2018. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  15. Alexander, Ella. "Matches Changes Brand Name". British Vogue. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  16. Conti, Samantha; Conti, Samantha (10 May 2017). "Matchesfashion.com Poised to Open Town House on London's Carlos Place". WWD. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  17. "Apax - Apax Funds to acquire MATCHESFASHION.COM". www.apax.com. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  18. "The Sunday Times Rich List". login.thesundaytimes.co.uk. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  19. "Tom Chapman". THE MARQUE. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  20. "Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Massenet Invest in 'Size-Inclusive' Brand Universal Standard". The Business of Fashion. 19 February 2018. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  21. Wightman-Stone, Danielle (4 February 2020). "CDLP raises 4.3 million euros in investment". fashionunited.uk. Retrieved 5 March 2020.
  22. Johnson, Jamie (15 April 2018). "Meet Ruth Chapman: the woman behind online designer clothing empire Matches Fashion". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  23. D’Souza, Christa (2 October 2016). "The £130m Matches woman: meet Ruth Chapman". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0956-1382. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  24. "Supporters of the Serpentine Galleries". Serpentine Galleries. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  25. McGregor, Kirsty. "From Wimbledon to the world: Matchesfashion's founders' lifetime achievement". Drapers. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  26. "No. 62866". The London Gazette (Supplement). 28 December 2019. p. N11.
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