Fashionmall.com, an American fashion portal which bought the bankrupt Boo.com last year, has started the year in vogue as a takeover target.
The New York company said yesterday it was seeking more information about a takeover offer made at the end of last week by GenesisIntermedia, a consumer products marketing group.
The offer came just a day after a much lower bid from Narax, a mergers and acquisitions boutique, was promptly dismissed by its target.
Anne-Marie Forehand, vice-president of Fashionmall, said the company would consider the GenesisIntermedia offer once more was known about it. The company has promised to announce its official response within 10 days of the bid being officially launched.
The GenesisIntermedia offer values Fashionmall at about $7 a share, or $52m (£34.6m) for the entire company. The bid was made in a letter to Ben Narasin, chief executive and largest shareholder in Fashionmail. At the same time Genesis announced it had bought 7%of its target on the open market.
Fashionmall hit the headlines in October when it bought failed Boo.com after the sports e-tailer had gobbled £80m of investors' cash.
The US fashion portal paid £250,000 for Boo's brand, logo right to use its domain name after the e-tailer went into receivership and gave Kate Buggeln the job of reviving the site.
In a statement Fashionmall.com said it was "not seeking to sell itself" but would consider the bid.
Shares in the company, a marketing portal for clothing retailers such as Banana Republic and Talbots, fell by a third yesterday to below $3 amid disappointment about the delay as well as profit taking after a sharp increase in the shares last week.
Narax, which is based in Beverly Hills, made an unsolicited offer last Thursday which valued the fashion site at $3.50 in cash, or about $26m. That bid represented a 40% premium to Fashionmall's shares on Wednesday but a significant discount to the record high of $8.75 reached in November 1999.
Fashionmall, which boasts some $35m of cash in hand, dismissed the Narax bid, going so far as to suggest that the financing for such a deal was not in place.
Mr Narasin, a fashion designer who founded the company six years ago, said he had twice tried to contact the head of Narax, Michael Savage, with little success. "It was strange," he told the New York Times. "You'd think they'd want to communicate with me if they wanted to do a deal."
The unsolicited bid was immediately followed by the rival share and cash offer from Genesis, which operates the Centerlinq shopping mall information network. Its machines allow shoppers to enroll in rewards programmes and access online services.
In its statement Los Angeles-based Genesis stressed potential synergies between its services and those of Fashionmall. Centerlinq claims to reach 35m consumers a month.
