👕 Reece Wabara: Man City to £70m

Meet Reece Wabara.

On 22nd May 2011, Reece Wabara made his Premier League debut for Manchester City, coming on for Pablo Zabaleta in the last game of Manchester City’s successful season.

Ten years later, Wabara no longer plays football. Instead, Reece runs the £70m e-commerce fashion empire Manière De Voir.

How has someone who played 10 minutes of Premier League football worth more than most Premier League footballers today?

This week, we look into his amazing story.

Despite being a talented defender, Wabara never quite made it at the top level of the game.

In the years following his debut, he went on loan to several clubs trying to play his way into a very competitive Manchester City system.

In late 2013, Reece founded Manière De Voir whilst on loan at Doncaster Rovers. Reece is very good friends with Liam Morgan who was building a fashion brand himself at the time, Gymshark.

The first Manière De Voir collection included T-Shirts, Hoodies and tracksuits and was largely modelled by friends and other footballers Reece had relationships with.

It wasn’t long before the luxury sports brand started to take off. By 2017, MDV had 300k followers on Instagram with some high profile clients sporting the gear.

• Raheem Sterling was pictured in MDV

• Anthony Joshua was pictured in MDV

In 2017 Reece had a decision to make. Plagued by injuries and torn between trying to make football and fashion work simultaneously, Reece decided to officially retire in 2017.

Shortly after, everything changed.

In 2019, sales grew 42% year-on-year with Manière De Voir posting a record £1.1m profit on revenues of £10.3m.

A year later, the profit tripled. Manière De Voir posted £3.3m profit on £23.4m revenue.

Reece started the brand with £15,000 capital and the business is entirely built on Shopify. Facebook Ads are used to scale the business aggressively.

Infact, after the growth in 2020, Reece made an eBook outlining how he used Facebook ads to scale MDV. The Facebook Ads Blueprint cost £500 each and sold 1,000 copies in a few days.

In early 2021 Reece posted an encouraging tweet showing the performance in Q1.

The year didn’t pan out towards £50m as the tweet suggested but it showed the momentum that MDV had at the time. Since then revenue and profits have looked like this:

The key thing with Reece is that MDV has a healthy profit margin. Most brands make a lot of top-line revenue but have profits of under 10%. Especially more recently, MDV maintains comfortable profits.

There are two back-of-the-envelope methods typically used to assess the value of an e-commerce fashion house:

1. A 5-10x multiple of revenue

2. A 8-12x multiple of profit

With the above numbers you can make your own judgement as to how much MDV is worth today.

A brilliant success story from Reece, who is still only 31 years old. His story is one of the main inspirations behind me making this platform.

More stories of this nature in the coming weeks.