Bernhard Willhelm ‘Karasaba’ Mini-Skirt | Source: Farfetch.com

LONDON, United Kingdom — Today, BoF can exclusively reveal that curated fashion marketplace Farfetch.com has raised a new $18 million round of funding from Index Ventures, eVenture Capital Partners and existing investors Advent Venture Partners, bringing the total amount of capital the company has raised to date to almost $25 million. The valuation of the company in this latest round was not disclosed.

Founded in 2008, the London-based Farfetch is an online marketplace for fashion that connects consumers with carefully selected product from a large global network of more than 100 independent boutiques.

“The online channel is growing tremendously, but it’s often difficult for small or even medium size businesses to create the teams and the platform to successfully reach a global online audience,” Farfetch founder José Neves told BoF. “I realised that the selection of these cutting-edge boutiques was really relevant to global fashionistas. You had boutiques such as RA in Antwerp stocking Meadham Kirchhoff, John Rocha or Rodarte which may have been sought by someone in Singapore or Sydney, but they were really constrained by geography.”

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Jose Neves, Founder and CEO, farfetch.com

LONDON, United Kingdom — Everyone now acknowledges the importance of online retail in fashion. But how does a small fashion boutique, with limited resources break into the e-commerce game? The costs of building and maintaining a top-quality site can be prohibitive, not to mention the operational challenge of managing deliveries and returns. What’s more, with everyone piling in to the fashion e-commerce game, there is so much product out there, on so many niche sites, that it can be tough for small retailers to attract traffic.

Enter farfetch.com, the brainchild of José Neves, a serial fashion entrepreneur who is also an owner of B-Store, Swear and SIX, a manufacturer and showroom for shoes by Opening Ceremony, Ksubi and Surface to Air. Through these myriad experiences, Neves identified an opportunity to support independent fashion boutiques and designers so that they can compete in the burgeoning online retail space with the same level of resources and customer service the big guns.

I caught up with José to learn more about the farfetch model and his plans to take the business model to the United States and Brazil.

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LONDON, United Kingdom — London, of course, is widely known in the fashion world for its unbridled creativity and superb emerging fashion talent. But, increasingly, it could also be described as fashion’s Silicon Valley, with a growing number of innovative fashion ecommerce startups sprouting in the city, following in the footsteps of the ultimate luxury e-tailing pioneer, Net-a-Porter.com.

During my visit to Vienna for the 9 Festival for Fashion & Photography, I had the privilege of hosting a discussion amongst some of the newest fashion e-tailers on the London scene, bringing together Sarah Curran, CEO of my-wardrobe.com, José Neves, CEO of farfetch.com and Stephanie Phair, Director of theoutnet.com.

Thanks to our easy-to-use Flip Video Mino, we managed to capture some of the most poignant responses from our illustrious panel and are pleased to share them with you in the coming weeks. First up: How are your clients changing their shopping habits in the downturn?

RSS and email subscribers, click here to watch the video.