Amid all the Farfetch bullshit from last week—the consummation of the Coupang deal, the defenestration of Line Sheet protagonist José Neves, the attendant and predictable executive shuffle—I suddenly realized I hadn’t heard a peep about Violet Grey. Farfetch acquired the beauty retailer for $55 million in early 2022 to become the backbone of Neves’s ill-conceived move into beauty. It was a terrible idea, both retrospectively and also at the time, because not only should Farfetch have clung to its platform roots, but plenty of other high-end retailers had struggled to sell beauty. Anyway, it happened… 

At the time, Neves argued that he had a secret weapon: Cassandra Grey, the business’s mysterious socialite founder. Post acquisition, Grey was elevated to a few new roles: adviser to Farfetch Beauty and head of its new (also ill-conceived) incubation arm, NGG Beauty, which was an offshoot of Off-White parent New Guards Group, which Farfetch acquired in 2019.