Fashion Business Report provides news on the fashion-related categories of apparel, footwear, accessories, intimates, fragrances, personal care, eye wear, watches, jewelry, home decor, and retail, while focusing on the topics of mergers, acquisitions, initial public offerings, divestitures, private equity, venture capital, manufacturing, licenses, design, and trends, among other subjects.

Richard Collings, who edits this Web site, was formerly a reporter for mergermarket, a publication of The Mergermarket Group, which is a unit of the Financial Times Group. While at mergermarket, Richard covered the consumer sector for three years, including apparel, footwear, and personal care, tracking merger and acquisition activity, as well as initial public offerings and private equity investment, among other topics.

Richard was also an associate editor for Investment Management Weekly, a publication of what was then Thomson Media, a unit of Thomson Financial. There, Richard wrote about the money management industry, focusing on the activity of public retirement funds and their money managers. This was during a period in which public funds were shifting their asset allocations primarily from debt or bonds to equities, and in which activist investing and alternative investments--such as hedge-fund-of-funds, real estate investment trusts or REITs, and socially responsible investments or SRIs--were increasingly the trend. It should be noted that Thomson Media was subsequently spun off and became SourceMedia.

Richard graduated from Columbia University, New York City, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

If additional information on this news service or its editor Richard Collings is desired, please send an e-mail with your questions to: info@fashionbusinessreport.com. Thank you.