Before there was a billionaire, there was a market stall. Mahmud Kamani's father, Abdullah, escaped war in Kenya in the 1960s and sold handbags in Manchester to feed his family. One account says he borrowed GBP500 from a friend in 1968 to start over, though that comes from a single newspaper profile and I would treat it with care. Another says six relatives shared one rented room.
The son grew up inside the trade. Kamani worked the stall, then the family wholesale firm Pinstripe, delivering goods in a van for his father. Where he was born and where he studied I could not verify.
The Sunday Times reported that workers at a Leicester supplier were paid GBP3.50 an hour.
It was at Pinstripe, which supplied chains such as Primark and New Look, that he met Carol Kane, who joined in 1993. In 2006 the two founded Boohoo. They knew what clothes cost to make and how fast a factory could turn a design around, and they put that knowledge on a website.
The turn came in March 2014, when Boohoo listed on AIM at 50p. Shares traded well above the float price. The company was valued at roughly GBP560m to GBP600m; Kamani made GBP135m and Kane GBP25m. By April 2017 it was worth about GBP2bn. Then it went shopping. Karen Millen and Coast in 2019, Oasis and Warehouse in 2020, the Debenhams name in January 2021 for GBP55m, and Burton, Wallis and Dorothy Perkins the next month.
The price arrived in July 2020. The Sunday Times reported that workers at a Leicester supplier were paid GBP3.50 an hour. A review by Allison Levitt QC found the allegations of poor working practices substantially true and called Boohoo's monitoring of factories inadequate. The share price fell 46% that month. Sir Brian Leveson was brought in for ethical oversight. A man whose father sold bags from a stall now faced a question about who was making his clothes.
The company has since changed. Since March 2025 it trades as Debenhams Group, though Frasers Group blocked the legal name change. In the year to February 2026, revenue fell to GBP917.0m from GBP1,217.9m, partly because of a marketplace shift, and the loss before tax narrowed to GBP108.6m.
The lesson is in the van. Kamani learned supply by delivering it. The advantage of knowing the factory floor is real, and so is the responsibility when someone else runs it.