Mahmud Kamani: a modern rags-to-riches tale

Mahmud Kamani turned fast-fashion website Boohoo into a business worth billions. The coronavirus crisis may have brought the company’s biggest challenge yet.

Mahmud Kamani
(Image credit: © Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for Boohoo)

When Boohoo, the Manchester-based fast-fashion sensation, floated in 2014, the FT observed how business in the old “Cottonopolis” had changed. Although the former mill district in the city’s northern quarter was still “a centre for the rag trade”, fortunes once made “by making clothes” were “now made from selling them”. No-one better exemplified this shift than Mahmud Kamani – an entrepreneur who “grew up on these streets” and went on to disrupt the British high-street with his online emporium.

The firm’s “explosive growth” – on the back of its PrettyLittleThing and Nasty Gal brands, plus some clever Instagram marketing – has defied the “doom and gloom” engulfing many rivals, says Business Insider: in the past five years, it has gone from £195m in sales to £1.2bn, making a billionaire of Kamani.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.