Liu Jo’s founder Marco Marchi buys 15% stake in Italian department store chain Coin

By

Laura Galbiati

Translated by
Nicola Mira

Published
Nov 6, 2019

Marco Marchi, the founder and president of Italian womenswear label Liu Jo has acquired a 15% stake in department store chain Coin through a share capital increase, looking to bolster the group’s growth and transformation. The value of the transaction was not disclosed. Marchi joins the pool of Italian investors that bought the Coin group from UK investment fund BC Partners in March 2018, and will now sit on Coin’s board of directors.

 
“Another leading Italian entrepreneur has shown faith in the Coin project, in our formula and expansion plans for [the Coin] retail brand,” said Giorgio Rossi, president of Coin SpA, adding that “the operation confirms the effectiveness of the strategic choices made by our investors and senior managers, and we are sure that Marco Marchi will give his own robust contribution to the acceleration of [Coin’s] ongoing transformation and development process.”
 
Last year, Coin began to deploy an upgrade and expansion strategy designed to reposition the chain upmarket, by striking new deals with leading brands, opening new branches, renovating existing ones and featuring the high-end Coin Excelsior format, which already operates branches in Rome in via Cola di Rienzo, in Milan in the CityLife shopping district and in Trieste on central corso Italia.

In 2020, the group plans to renovate the branches in Verona, which will become Coin Excelsior, Como and Milan corso Vercelli, while the group’s Coincasa home decoration chain will open a new branch in Udine on November 8, following the recent inaugurations of stores in Belluno and Bassano del Grappa, in northern Italy.
 
Coincasa currently operates 100 stores, of which 30 outside Italy, chiefly in Europe and the Middle East, and will be increasingly relying on an omni-channel approach. The chain’s e-tail site, launched over 5 years ago, is growing at a rate of 30% per annum.
 
The group generated a revenue of €450 million in 2018. On the Italian domestic market, Coin SpA directly operates 40 Coin department stores which, together with the Coincasa stores, showcase more than 800 brands over a retail area of 115,000 m2, with approximately 35 million store visits per year.