Chief Commercial Officer for private equity backed Mall for Africa
Mall for Africa (MFA) is an online shopping mall backed by Helios Investment Partners, the largest private equity investor in Africa.
The business model was borne of an original desire to enable mass market consumers in Nigeria to buy product from leading brands and retailers in the USA and the UK.
Helios provided substantial backing to develop this model, and to continue to roll it out across other countries in Africa – and to apply the MFA platform globally in territories where a similar market dynamic exits: whereby consumers cannot buy from US and UK retailers online, and have it shipped to them.
The advantage to the consumer is that they can buy and have delivered UK and US branded product, and to the brands and retailers, the MFA platform opens-up new countries and regions for them to sell to: at low cost, and low risk.
Spectrum were retained to hire MFA’s 1st Chief Commercial Officer, who would report directly to the co-founders in the US and in Africa.
A shortlist of five candidates was presented by Spectrum, and were interviewed by Mall for Africa and Helios.
The appointed candidate, Rob Gorton, will be based at MFA’s global headquarters in London. Rob began his career in venture capital, before founding two businesses in the online fashion world which he sold to one of the world’s largest media companies in the summer of 2016.
The beauty of eCommerce is that it can be geographically boundary less. The compelling aspect of MFA’s platform is that it provides brands and retailers in the mature US and UK markets with an opportunity to open-up completely new and significant territories which they could not do themselves without incurring significant cost and risk. And of course, the MFA online mall enables consumers to obtain products that they could not otherwise buy without travelling to the US or UK. We were delighted to have the opportunity to support MFA as it builds its executive leadership capability to capture the very significant global market opportunity that exits for it to exploit.
Daniel Osmer, Managing Partner, Spectrum
Case Study Overview
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Chief Commercial Officer
Consultant
Daniel Osmer