In a statement Vivy also says that the company had to quickly adapt by focusing on dUCk and LILIT to survive the pandemic.
She added that the company had not “retrenched any team members over the last 3 years”
“The strategy is now to grow dUCk and LILIT. individually under the FashionValet Group – dUCk as a premium modest fashion leader and LILIT. as the go-to for affordable modest fashion staples.”
FashionValet and the dUck Group founder, Vivy Sofinas Yusof.
It was further explained that the move was done in stages. In 2021, all vendors were notified early of the new direction. From there, the focus of FashionValet gradually shifted to dUCk and LILIT websites.
“We’d like to clarify that our investors invested into the FashionValet organisation which fully owns dUCk and LILIT.”
FashionValet and the dUck Group founder, Vivy Sofinas Yusof.]
The thing is, in 2019 FV reported RM10 million in losses and still received 2.99M USD from Inspire (Permodalan Nasional Berhad). The year prior, it had already received 9.07M USD from Pulau Tiga Ventures (Khazanah Nasional Berhad) and one other investor.
Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB) is a Government-owned investment company and Khazanah Nasional Berhad (Khazanah) is the Government’s sovereign wealth fund. In other words, they are responsible for investing taxpayer money to grow the nation’s wealth and economy.
It also means that millions of taxpayers’ money have gone into a startup company that is now closed.
But criticism against FV seems to have gone beyond the government investing the rakyat’s money in a company that is not making a profit.
Aliff Ahmad, the co-founder of scrut.my – a platform that provides car auction history and vehicle history for Japan and UK imported cars – scrutinises (pun intended) how FV was spending more money than it had, some of which came from taxpayers’ pockets.
In short, Aliff claims that FV had been spending its money irresponsibly and yet it still received investment from PNB and Khazanah.
