Carmen Busquets is the millionaire investor behind dozens of glamorous fashion businesses, from Net-a-Porter to Flowerbx. But her life – fleeing violence in Venezuela, learning to live with partial deafness and body dysmorphia – has been much less glossy.Venezuelan entrepreneur Carmen Busquets’ public persona is that of a slightly ditzy fashionista but she has one of the sharpest brains in business.
You might not expect such admissions from someone who has made a fortune from fashion’s next big things. But many things about Busquets are unexpected. For those in the fashion world, her name is synonymous with luxury and profit; for those who know her, she embodies seemingly opposite priorities, such as sustainability and detachment from material possessions.
It sounds idealistic, but in 2018 it earned Busquets an award from the United Nations-linked Fashion 4 Development group for “recalibrating the fashion industry to the benefit of people and planet”. She has also proved herself, yet again, to be ahead of the commercial curve. Bain & Co forecasts that in five years rentals will account for 45 per cent of the luxury market.
; her brother died during a game of Russian roulette. She rushed back to Caracas, where the family tried to put back together its broken world. Busquets was shown the ropes of her father’s businesses, in a series of “boring” roles: in accounting, in a factory; and in the import-and-export department, where she learnt that import tariffs were about to be slashed. She persuaded her sceptical father to invest in an import venture of her own – a boutique selling high-end fashion from Europe.
Venezuela, on the other hand, was in turmoil. Hugo Chávez, who had led a failed military coup in 1992, was elected president in 1998, then re-elected on a revolutionary platform in 2000. A plummeting currency threatened to make Cabus unviable, and when the press reported some anti-Chávez remarks that Busquets had made, her shop was attacked. The spray of bullets broke three windows. “Thank god we were having lunch out the back.
Busquets during a visit to a Bhutan nunnery in 2019. Most of her energy now goes into charitable work.The work takes her to some exotic and sometimes dangerous places: Guatemala, Colombia, El Salvador. It reminds her, too, that as an unmarried woman without children , she defies the conventions of many cultures, especially in Latin America.
drink a glass of water on an empty stomach every day but avoid eating or drinking anything for around 45 minutes.