Vestiaire Collective, CEO
Company background
Vestiaire Collective is the leading pre-owned luxury fashion marketplace in Europe. With a differentiated model based on curation, authentication, and a powerful brand community, the business had reached scale across Europe and entered the US and Asia.
Backed by Vitruvian, Eurazeo, and other top-tier investors, the business was poised to accelerate its path toward global market leadership. To support this ambition, Vestiaire sought a new CEO to lead the company through its next phase of international expansion, operational scale, and value creation.
The approach
Up was engaged to appoint a seasoned digital CEO with a track record of scaling consumer marketplaces globally. The brief required someone with deep operating experience across multiple regions, particularly Asia and the US, who could bring strategic clarity, executional discipline, and commercial rigour to an already successful platform.
The ideal candidate needed to be highly data-driven, customer- and product-centric, and capable of building high-performance teams and infrastructure at scale. An affinity with fashion, brand-building, and cross-border logistics was also key, as was experience managing investor relationships and navigating complex capital structures.
The impact
Up placed Max Bittner, who turned the business into a unicorn. Max is a proven CEO who previously founded and led Lazada, Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce platform. Under his leadership, Lazada scaled to over $5bn in GMV and 7,000+ employees across six countries. He built group-level functional excellence across marketing, tech, data, and logistics, and successfully transitioned the business from a retail-led model to a high-margin marketplace. He also led multiple funding rounds and the eventual sale to Alibaba.
Since Max’s appointment at Vestiaire Collective, the business has scaled to over $1Bn GMV and a $1.7Bn valuation across 80 markets globally, supported by significant new investment rounds from global investors.
