Luxe Collective has been bought by US luxury resale platform Fashionphile after it collapsed in the wake of a warehouse break-in.
The San Diego-based company, whose celebrity ambassadors include Nicole Ritchie and Emma Roberts, will bring back Luxe Collective’s founders to launch a new Fashionphile UK arm.
Co-founder Ben Gallagher said he was excited about the prospect of opening a showroom in south-west London amid a ‘new era’ for luxury fashion.
The deal includes the intellectual property, customer database, and social media channels of Luxe Collective, which went into insolvency in May.
This means the Liverpool-based second-hand seller’s social media and website will be rebranded, including its Instagram account which has 650,000 followers.
Luxe Collective was co-founded in 2018 by brothers Ben and Joe Gallagher in their parents’ house.
The duo appeared on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den series in January 2024 – where they received a £100,000 investment from Steven Bartlett for 3 per cent of the firm. Â
But it shut down in May 2025 after struggling in the wake of a break-in in July 2024 at its warehouse in Ormskirk, Lancashire.
Nicole Ritchie is an ambassador for US luxury resale platform Fashionphile
Police never found the culprits, who managed to steal half of its stock – which was worth more than £500,000.
At the time, co-founder Ben said that fighting to keep the business afloat had been ‘the most painful in my life’, and he had ‘never been so mentally and physically drained, stressed and constantly anxious.’
The brothers will head up the UK business, with Ben as director of brand marketing and Joe as the director of operations.
They hope to open a flagship – containing a stockroom and showroom, as well as an authentication base where experts will determine if goods are legitimate – in south-west London soon, in the style of Fashionphile’s gigantic LA store.
But the brothers said security measures will be tough and may include asking customers to show ID on entry.
Ben Gallagher said the luxury industry – which has struggled in recent years due to a slowdown in demand in the US and China – was ‘very exciting at the moment’.
He pointed to a raft of new creative directors, which include Jonathan Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, and a boom in demand for pre-owned handbags.
He added: ‘Luxury fashion feels like it’s in its new era again. It’s like in 1997, when Tom Ford had just taken the reins at Gucci, Marc Jacob at Louis Vuitton. It’s a new era, there’s a lot of excitement and it will be completely different to what we see before.’
It is also the first venture into Europe by Fashionphile, which was founded in 1999 in the US but is little-known in the UK currently. It sells high-end brands including Chanel, Hermès, Gucci and Louis Vuitton.
Steven Bartlett (second from right) took a Dragons’ Den investment in Luxe Collective founded by brothers Joe and Ben Gallagher (left and second left) and Oliver Millar (right)
Sarah Davis, founder and president of Fashionphile, said: ‘Luxe Collective has always been about more than resale. Ben and Joe have built a real community that connects with luxury in a fresh and authentic way.
‘The hardships they faced last year were heartbreaking not only for Joe and Ben, but also their entire community. We could not be more thrilled to help bring a breath of life back into the essence of what Ben & Joe Gallagher started. This is about preserving their voice and giving it the resources to thrive on an international stage.’
At the time of the firm’s collapse, Ben also said the ‘emotional and mental toll’ of the robbery ‘ultimately affected my leadership & strategic decision making,’ and he ‘made decisions that, in retrospect, I regret & I got wrong.’
But he told This is Money that the new firm would be ‘going to back to its roots’ by paying 100 per cent for its stock up front after adopting a consignment model, where they sold goods on behalf of the owner and took a cut of the profits.
The luxury industry is hoping for signs of green shoots this winter after even industry giants such as LVMH have seen sales plunge.
Consumer appetite for pricey goods has dwindled after a post-pandemic spending boom cooled while Donald Trump’s erratic tariff decisions has also put shoppers on edge.
But Deutsche Bank analysts suggested in a note this month that the sector has reasons to be upbeat.
‘Consumer confidence faces less obvious geo-political challenges in 2026, stock markets remain robust and housing wealth should recover,’ the note suggested.
Online re-sale platforms have been some of the most high-profile casualties of the global luxury goods downturn.
The New York-listed LuxExperience recently announced 700 job losses at its luxury website divisions – Yoox Net-a-Porter, one of the big names on the UK scene, and at MyTheresa, a German business.
And in December 2023, Farfetch, one of London’s biggest names in the sector, was rescued from bankruptcy by South Korea’s Coupang in a £370m bailout.
Another well-known UK website, Matches Fashion, was abandoned this year after being rescued by Frasers’ titan Mike Ashley.
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