Carmen BUSQUETS’84 is sitting on a sleek, curved sofa in her London flat, where mixed-media contemporary art and handcrafted decorative objects provide an inspired backdrop for the meetings she regularly holds here. The residence doubles as one of her offices, for Carmen is just as likely to be working from any number of international destinations, including the homes where she grew up in Caracas, Verbier (Switzerland), Barcelona and Miami, as well as a Paris apartment. Her boyfriend is based in New York and her mother lives in the Bahamas.
With her oversized glasses and silvery streaked hair, Carmen has a striking presence.She is wearing a champagne-hued Paco Rabanne dress that gives a relaxed silhouette even though it is elaborately embellished with black embroidery and studs. Silver metal chains are draped across her lithe frame, while her faux-fur slides reveal a side more playful than might be expected of someone so business-oriented. But given that her focus is fashion—and she has carved out this niche as a highly driven woman—projecting a non-conventional style underscores her confidence and awareness of the industry. “I know how to dress up and I know how to act proud. But it’s an act, an alter ego, because you need to survive by appearing a certain way, and you need to know when to dress as a business person.” Her approach to power dressing, in other words, has evolved from a larger sense of both image and purpose.
Yet for all the signalling of her artistic taste and expressive style, Carmen maintains a low profile relative to her success as an investor, entrepreneur and philanthropist. She is a respected force in fashion who has parlayed her Venezuelan upbringing and ongoing passion for learning into a career that has brought her both significant fortune and personal fulfillment. It is no exaggeration to suggest that she has had a singular impact on shaping global luxury e-commerce while supporting both startups and visionary individuals across the fashion-tech industry. Over the years, articles have referred to Carmen as “fashion’s fairy godmother,” “the high priestess of internet haute couture” and “the hidden face of luxury online business.”
Indeed, while her three decades of experience transcend a single job title, Carmen is best known as the co-founding investor in Net-a-Porter. In 2000, having already run her own luxury boutique in Caracas for 10 years, she actively sought an opportunity to help finance high-end fashion sales online. Together with her family, she was the largest single investor, and after Net-a-Porter was sold to Compagnie Financière Richemont in 2010, Carmen and family exited very successfully, multiplying their initial investment many times over.
In 2006 she launched London-based CoutureLab, a multifaceted platform and creative laboratory spanning online and physical stores and selling bespoke pieces. As her investments increased, she formed Cabus Venture, named after her fashion boutique in Caracas, which she founded and ran from 1990 (when she was just 25) to 2002. The Cabus Venture portfolio would come to include Moda Operandi, Cult Beauty, Lyst, Farfetch, Tagwalk and The Business of Fashion news site. Even her website, carmenbusquets.com, which outlines her involvement with myriad companies, doesn’t reveal the extent to which people constantly seek her out for investment and counsel.
“As an entrepreneur and investor who has fought to carve my place in a male-dominated industry, I devote a lot of my time to mentoring female entrepreneurs, teaching them what I have learned about running sustainable and profitable businesses that generate cash and are focused on growth,” she says. “I like to encourage women to always be true to themselves and to find what they really want in life, instead of letting society or their families impose decisions on them. By empowering young women to become independent and interdependent, they learn to grow up feeling more secure in themselves and have the confidence of surrounding themselves with the best people.”
If Carmen has all the qualities of a natural leader, she says this wasn’t the case during her four years as a Boarding student at Branksome. Yet she insists this period was foundational to her development. “I wasn’t a leader at Branksome,” she explains. “Although some people might remember how I dressed up, I do not think I did it to stand out. Or to inspire other people. I think I did it because that was my own individualism, my own creativity.”
But how did Carmen end up so far from Caracas? Her father grew up in Spain during that country’s civil war, then moved to Venezuela, where he became a successful metallurgical industrialist specializing in cabling. Her mother, a sociologist and anthropologist, was born in Cuba and moved to Toronto at age 13 to attend boarding school. Years later, she met Carmen’s father, when business brought him to Toronto. They eventually settled together in Caracas, but it was the Toronto connection that led them to Branksome.
“I needed to go to Branksome,” says Carmen. “I remember visiting and saying, ‘I want to come here.’ Religious schools got the worst of me, whereas Branksome got the best out of me. And if I couldn’t give more, my best, it’s because I had my limitations, which I didn’t know that I had back then. But for me, it was a happy time.”
When she was a student, she had yet to be diagnosed as dyslexic and 60 per cent deaf. She remembers how she would sit at the front of the class, not because she wanted to be seen as an avid student but because she needed to hear her teachers and watch them closely. What might have otherwise impeded her growth became a tool to help her experiment and adapt.
Today, she believes not only that her intuition is sharper as a result but that vulnerabilities can be reframed as strengths—a survival instinct, in effect. “I listen to body language, and sometimes I realize the biggest thing you need in business, before you meet people and before investing, is to understand whether they’re walking their talk. This is a skill that I developed thanks to my deafness, my sound distortion and my dyslexia, which I would have never been able to have otherwise.”
If this is her superpower, does she have any secrets to her business success? “I don’t invest in all my businesses thinking that I’m going to be huge. That’s a factor of surprise and luck that I cannot control, that no one can control. We’ve seen many times that the biggest businesses have gone bust in times of challenging economic situations while other businesses have grown during the same situations.”
And she acknowledges that financial freedom can be self-perpetuating, creating even more opportunity—a luxury many people do not have. “By running my own companies and the businesses I had some kind of control over—like Net-a-Porter and Cult Beauty—I understood the need to be profitable and to generate cash to gain your own freedom and success. When you manage to do these two things early on, the sky’s the limit. Women cannot afford to lose money in their companies, so generally women founders are super cautious and more prone to generate profit and cash.”
While artificial intelligence has become an area of interest, Carmen also notes that, in fashion, innovation is often generational, with trends reflecting people more than technology. “Generation Z fascinates me, and all of my disruptor businesses are geared toward them. They remind me of what I was like in the 1980s, too early for my own good. I feel that the Generation Z kids are more individualistic and that they are savvy buyers who know what they want with more clarity. Instead of following fashion’s general trends, they create multiple niche trends,” she says. “All of this is great for the fashion industry because it is forcing brands to change and to adapt to the new social and environmental consciousness, or else risk being left behind.”
With Carmen’s parents exposing her to eastern philosophies and the teachings of Greek-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff from a young age, she remains intentional about everything she does—from beginning each day with meditation to extending support to various institutions and non-profit organizations. She is on the board of Glasswing International, Nest and Parsons School of Design, and is a national council member of World Wildlife Fund. Glasswing, a non-profit that fosters health, education and community programs in Latin America and New York, is particularly close to Carmen’s heart for its strides in mental health for those affected by trauma. Nest is a non-profit dedicated to the responsible growth of the handmade economy, which is driven primarily by women.
As for business, what drives her to invest over and over again? She’s looking, she says, for something she hasn’t seen already. “People keep coming to me for the same investments that I have done in the past. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to go to the past.’ I invest out of curiosity—this is my master’s.” By which she means that startup financing is a bit like undertaking an intensive postgrad degree. “By the end, you’re going to spend $100,000 to $150,000 to go to the school. I may as well do the school with the founders and learn from them and learn their business.”
Spending a few hours with Carmen provides a mere glimmer of her wide-ranging views and perspective on the world. But perhaps she is also deliberately reserved about her brilliant mind. “Somebody once told me that I dress down my intelligence. And I’d say maybe it’s because I don’t like to sound arrogant. I have always been careful with this kind of thing because I’m deaf, so the fact that sometimes I cannot hear people leads to a misunderstanding of them thinking that I am arrogant.”
Carmen points out that overcoming challenges and obstacles, no matter their magnitude, will always require effort, which is why she continues to draw strength and balance from her mind and body disciplines. “I am quite resilient and fearless in the way I deal with my personal and professional life. I believe in feeling the fear and doing it anyway,” she says.
Of course, someone can be both a learner and a leader—and while she admits that her trajectory has been unique, Carmen notes that life is what you make it. “I think everybody’s journey is a beautiful journey. I just think that we must put a lot of effort into making it interesting—by observing, by always asking questions of yourself.”
Featured image by Kathy Boos. Inset images provided by Carmen Busquets.
