Imran Amed


Imran Amed is a Canadian-British fashion expert and founder and editor-in-chief of The Business of Fashion. He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to fashion.

Background

Amed was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and is of Indian descent. Amed attended McGill University in Montreal, Quebec and after graduation worked as a management consultant. In 2000, he enrolled at Harvard Business School to complete an MBA. Upon graduation in 2002, he moved to London to work for McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm. He left McKinsey in 2006 to explore his interest in the fashion industry.

Editorial work

An industry outsider, Amed started writing a blog, "The Business of Fashion", about the fashion business in January 2007 from his sofa at home in London in the evenings, while consulting for fashion brands and emerging designers during the day. Prior to that, Amed had set up a company providing capital to designers, which lasted for a year.
New in the fashion world was his idea to keep readers up to date with an e-mail newsletter. In 2018, his daily newsletter had nearly 500,000 subscribers.
Amed has conducted interviews with some of the fashion world's biggest names, including Karl Lagerfeld, Kate Moss, Giorgio Armani, Yohji Yamamoto, Raf Simons, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Tom Ford, Tommy Hilfiger, Stella McCartney, Franca Sozzani, Natalie Massenet, Nick Knight, Dolce & Gabbana, and Jefferson Hack. He has also interviewed the CEOs of global fashion businesses including Kering, Chanel, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Versace, Fendi, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Calvin Klein, Nike, Benetton, Lacoste, and Marc Jacobs.
Until 2013 Amed was main contributor to "The Business of Fashion". Between 2013 and 2018 BoFs annual sales increased by more than 50 percent each year. BoF employs nearly 80 people in offices in London, New York and Shanghai.

Awards and honors

In 2011, Amed was named one of the 100 most influential men in Britain by British GQ and one of the 50 most influential Global Indians by Indian GQ.
In 2012, he was featured on the Wired100 list of the most influential figures in Britain's digital economy and was ranked number one on Indian GQ's list of the 10 best-dressed Global Indians.
In 2015, he was named Honorary Professor of Fashion Business at Glasgow Caledonian University.
In 2016, at the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards, Amed was awarded the Media Award in Honor of Eugenia Sheppard.

Products

In 2011, Amed launched a bag design collaboration with British leather goods designer Bill Amberg.

Books