WHAT BEGAN as a personal blog has grown into a global movement that delivers news, analysis, and forward-thinking solutions for the fashion retail industry. The Business of Fashion (BoF), founded by Imran Amed, is now an essential resource for fashion creatives, executives, and entrepreneurs worldwide.
"Simply changing leadership at the top will not be enough. We need a wholesale reevaluation of the luxury fashion sector's meaning and purpose for customers seeking value, creativity, and transparency," Amed recently wrote on Instagram, where he commands the attention of over 205,000 followers.
In 2024, BoF achieved a remarkable milestone: 100,000 paying members across 125 countries, cementing its position as the world's largest community of fashion professionals. BoF was also named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies for the second time.
As Amed, who also serves as chief executive, proudly observed, "It is now a sustainably profitable, growing media business – rare in today's challenging industry."
Under his leadership, BoF has evolved beyond traditional journalism, diversifying revenue streams through events, online courses, and a robust career database. The platform's digital footprint is staggering, with over 1.8 million followers on X, 3 million on Instagram, and 1 million on Facebook.
A Harvard Business School graduate, Amed worked at McKinsey before launching BoF in 2006. He serves as an honorary professor of fashion business at the Glasgow Caledonian University and an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins at the University of the Arts London, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2018.
In 2017, he was made an OBE for services to the fashion industry. He was the youngest-ever recipient of the Desautels Management Achievement Award at McGill University in 2014 and received the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Media Award in Honor of Eugenia Sheppard in 2016.
Last year, he expanded his influence by launching The Business of Beauty Global Awards and hosting the ninth edition of VOICES, BoF's annual industry summit. The eleventh edition of the BoF 500 – celebrating fashion's most influential figures – brought together luminaries like Kylie Jenner and Victoria Beckham.
BoF now operates with a team of more than 100 professionals across the world's fashion capitals, including London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Milan. His commitment to fostering diverse perspectives within the organisation is evident in initiatives like ‘Belong at BoF,’ a dedicated council championing diversity, inclusion, community, and equity.
"It's not just about glamour; this is an industry. Look at the jobs on BoF Careers and the different pathways available. There's still much work to be done in explaining how diverse and multifaceted this business really is," Amed has said, who is Indian by ethnicity, East African by heritage, Canadian by birth, and British by choice.
Amed, who will turn 50 in April, remains focused on fashion's future, particularly AI's transformative potential.
"We're at the very beginning of this shift, but I haven't felt this curious since the early days of the internet," he has said, envisioning how AI could revolutionise personalised shopping while addressing fashion's sustainability challenges.
