Carmen Busquets
Carmen Busquets
Carmen Busquets is a Venezuelan pioneer luxury and fashion entrepreneur. She is involved with Internet fashion and is known for being a co-founder investor, and board director of Net-a-Porter until 2010, when she sold the majority of her shares to Richemont Group. She is also the founder of CoutureLab. Busquets retains a 2.3% stake in Net-a-Porter; she is also a board member and investor of Astley Clarke and an early investor of Moda Operandi, Maiyet, The Business of Fashion, Lyst...
NationalityVenezuelan
ProfessionBusinesswoman
CountryVenezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)
I've lived with someone and probably will again, but I don't want children and I have known that since I was little. My parents thought I would change my mind. My boyfriends always think I'm going to change my mind, but it never happened. I fall in love with my businesses.
I was always into fashion, and used to go on spending sprees when I was a university student in Miami. My father would be furious, but I would always say, 'It was an emergency! I had a party to go to!'
Customers want to buy something which is not expensive because of a label but which is costly because of the time taken to produce it.
I look for individuality in the artisans I work with for CoutureLab; a loving relationship with the product and care in the construction, along with the story behind it, make couture desirable to consumers looking for something that cannot be mass-produced.
I have a funny accent in every language.
Sometimes I make it to parties and sometimes I don't. Social life is always something you can go back to.
My creative side is identifying all these great entrepreneurial creative people that come up with great ideas, whether they are in fashion or technology or a new tool to improve ourselves.
Investors are impatient and they are also desperate for the 'next big thing,' and they are not paying attention to the fact that the 'next big thing' can be an economic crisis that they have created by being very irresponsible with their power.
Why give a million dollars to someone if they have not proved that they can make a million dollars?
When I was young I would spend more money than I should with my credit card but my father cut it off, so I had to find creative ways of making money.
I rarely have time for lunch, so tend to have a big breakfast and big dinner.
People need patience. It takes time to build a brand.
My mother was a sociologist and an intellectual, and my father was an industrialist with a business in copper and aluminum wire. He was very strict and he wanted me to work in the family business - for him, the worst thing was having a daughter who worked in fashion.
So I'm half deaf - and dyslexic. How about that? Nobody's perfect, and I'm proud of my defects.