The many faces of young rich-lister Dean Mintz, founder of online fashion retailer Cettire
In just seven years, reclusive Melbourne entrepreneur Dean Mintz built a $1bn empire and amassed an estimated $729m personal fortune. So who is he and where did he come from?
In only seven years, and less than four as the boss of a listed public company, reclusive entrepreneur Dean Mintz has built an entity worth about $1bn and amassed an estimated $729m personal fortune.
The 38-year-old founder of online fashion retailer Cettire has made more than $300m in cash from selling down shares in the business since floating it on the ASX eight days before Christmas in late 2020.
Mr Mintz rocketed into the The List – Australia’s Richest 250 this year with more wealth than business veterans such as John Symond and Nicholas Moore, and is one of the wealthiest 30-somethings in Australia
But he may be one of the shyest chief executives or founders of a public company on the ASX.
And controversy is starting to swirl around Mr Mintz and Cettire’s business model, as questions grow about his active avoidance of the limelight and his company’s business model – selling luxury goods at discounted prices via wholesalers to customers around the world and not handling the merchandise centrally at all.
There have been few details released about Mr Mintz – who has never given a media interview or been independently photographed – and little in the way of discussions about the rapid growth of Cettire and his career.
In Cettire’s prospectus from its late 2020 ASX float, a short biography of Mr Mintz describes him having a “15-year old career as a serial entrepreneur with a focus on cutting edge technology” and says he formed an incubator, Ark Technologies, in 2014, from which Cettire was established in 2017 when Mr Mintz was 31.
“Prior to Cettire, Dean ran a digital agency offering software development, web design and internet marketing services with a prestigious client base including international corporate clients and local government.”
But The Australian has obtained documents and seen corporate records showing that before Mr Mintz started Ark he founded a string of companies and business entities, including an internet domain name business, Mitan IT, that has direct online links to an ebook once offered for sale that gives advice on how to pick up strippers.
Mitan Group Pty Ltd, of which Mr Mintz was a director and 50 per cent shareholder from January 2009 to January 2010, according to documents lodged with the corporate regulator, was a web design business that used the business name Just Simple. Mr Mintz was a director of Just Simple Pty Ltd from February 10 to November 2021. A Cettire source claims Just Simple never had an association with Mitan.
An archived version of its Mitan IT’s website said it was a “full service web solutions company with worldwide provisions headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.”
Sample offerings of its work on the site said it had clients including a luxury apartment project in Shanghai, modelling agency Star Model Agency, fitness centres and hair studios.
A Whirlpool forum user in 2010 complained that Mitan may have been trying to orchestrate a domain name scam with one of his clients, offering a domain name for purchase that was similar to the one the client already owned.
The Australian has seen digital evidence including the same IP addresses linking Mitan and Just Simple to an online ebook called “Learn how to get Real Strippers into Bed from Strippermaster.com”.
The ebook was sold for $US29 and offered readers tips on how to “learn the secrets to attracting some of the most desired women on earth – Strippers”.
“How to pick up Strippers – it’s not a book for every man,” advertising for the ebook stated. “But it is the only book for any man who is ready for the absolute ultimate in sexual challenges and conquests.” The “Aussie pickup artist” author of the ebook said he was “a mere 5 foot 6 (inches) and a bit scrawny … (with a) cauliflower ear”.
A Cettire spokesman said: “Dean categorically states that he has never heard of nor did he have any involvement in the mentioned website.”
The Australian is not suggesting otherwise.
Regarding Mr Mintz’s involvement with Mitan, the Cettire spokesman said: “Dean is a career entrepreneur. While Dean was attending university, he was a director of Mitan for a period of 12 months, whereby Dean had no involvement in the day to day management of the business.”
Early years
South African-born Mr Mintz attended high school in Melbourne – a 2001 newspaper article says a Dean Mintz won an under-18 table tennis championship in Sunbury – and later earned Bachelor of Information Systems and Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) degrees from the University of Melbourne. More recently he has trained for and competed in mixed martial arts events, including the 2017 Pan Pacific Jiu-Jitsu championship.
Cettire’s prospectus says Ark Technologies “had a focus on developing technological innovation in social media, mobile, web applications and e-commerce”.
Cettire was established in October 2017 and three years later claimed annualised monthly gross revenue of about $110m and annualised monthly sales revenue of about $85m, up, it said, 570 per cent on the previous corresponding period.
Annual sales revenue had soared from $500,000 in the 2018 financial year to $70m by 2021, Cettire’s prospectus said.
Mr Mintz received $25m from the selldown of stock from Cettire’s float at 50c per share, and by November 2021 the company’s shares had surged to $4.21. They were below the float price within seven months, but then mostly kept rising before hitting a high of $4.66 in February this year.
Mr Mintz has sold about $335m worth of stock since early 2022, including $127m from the sale of 27.5m Cettire shares in March.
The corporate regulator is understood to have looked at the timing of the most recent share selldown by Mr Mintz, but found nothing untoward with its execution. The Australian Securities and & Investments Commission declined to comment.
Mr Mintz purchased a $14.5m mansion in Melbourne’s upmarket Toorak.
A Cettire spokesman said: “As described in multiple ASX releases, Dean has sold shares to diversify his holdings, enhance liquidity in the stock and facilitate inclusion of Cettire shares in the major share indices. Dean continues to be Cettire’s largest shareholder with a 30 per cent shareholding. This is one of the largest founder shareholdings of all ASX companies in the ASX 300.”
One source who has met Mr Mintz describes him as a “shy computer-nerd type of character who has built a good piece of technology, has good relationships with suppliers and is good at digital marketing.”
Another source who has dealt with Mr Mintz said his technology simply matched demand from customers for luxury goods to wholesalers who are looking to offload excess stock but outside their own countries.
One executive who has dealt with Mr Mintz said he was shy and would turn his camera off during video calls, preferring to talk over the phone, and did not like negative scrutiny.
But so far big investors such as Phil King’s Regal Fund Management, Cat Rock Capital Management in the US, and now Geoff Wilson’s Wilson Asset Management have backed Mr Mintz and enjoyed a rising share price that is about five times the original float price.
In a market update in April, Cettire said it had reached sales revenue of $191m in the March quarter, up 88 per cent from the previous corresponding period, and now had about 644,000 active customers – up 84 per cent.
Cettire also sought to deal with allegations it had not been registered to collect sales tax in California and Texas, saying it was now registered for sales tax in the vast majority of US states. In the 9 months to March, the company collected approximately $18.7m in US sales taxes. Total remittances of US sales taxes during the period were $17.1m.
Cettire had faced questions about whether it was failing to pay appropriate duty on goods ordered by customers, including discrepancies between estimates of duties and the amount of money actually paid on imported goods. It changed some of its customer policies in March, including not disclosing what duties are owed on purchases.
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‘This is an outlier company, and that naturally attracts scepticism from competitors and short sellers’
Cat Rock managing partner Alex Captain on Cettire
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In an April interview with Value Investor Insight, Cat Rock managing partner Alex Captain said Cettire sourced its products primarily from wholesale suppliers based in Italy or France, and had two-thirds of its sales from Britain, the US and Australia.
Captain said Cettire accounted for only 0.5 per cent of the $US100bn in annual sales generated by luxury wholesalers, who sold about 70 per cent of total global luxury soft-good sales each year. He said Cettire had about 70 employees and offered goods from over 2500 brands, typically at prices 20-30 per cent below competing online platforms.
“They’re able to do that in part because they fulfil orders using a highly automated drop-ship system that doesn’t require the company to hold inventory or make fashion bets,” Mr Captain said.
Asked about concerns about Cettire, Mr Captain said: “This is an outlier company, and that naturally attracts scepticism from competitors and short sellers.
“Investing in an e-commerce retailer isn’t without risk but given the growth opportunity here we can arrive at reasonable scenarios where this over time is a double-digit multi-bagger.”
Yet scepticism seems to be building given Cettire’s rise, with short-seller activity just about doubling in the past month, according to Shortman data, to make it almost among the top 30 shorted stocks on the ASX with about 4.7 per cent of its register loaned out.
Cettire shares have fallen about 20 per cent since a rare public appearance by Mr Mintz at a Macquarie conference in Sydney earlier in April.
As is habit, no photographs of the Cettire founder were allowed but some media members were let into the room.
No unfiltered questions were allowed from the floor – rules that did not apply to most other conference speakers.
Mr Mintz said at the conference that “the composition of our employee base is unique and heavily weighted towards engineering, which is something that you typically see in normal e-commerce business. (And) that’s ultimately how we’re able to do what we’re doing.”
