Ravi Thakran sees Wheels Up as part of building aspirational brands
Ravinder Singh (Ravi) Thakran’s Aspirational Consumer Lifestyle Corp. announced today that it will combine with Wheels Up, an online platform for booking flights on private aircraft in the U.S.
Wheels Up’s platform, based on proprietary technology which includes a flight management system, enables its 11,000 members to search, book, and fly privately. In 2020, the company flew more than 150,000 passengers, using its access to over 1,500 owned, managed, and third-party partner aircraft.
In addition to private flights, Wheels Up offers membership programs, aircraft management, aircraft sales, solutions for corporate travel and commercial travel benefits through a partnership with Delta Air Lines.
The merger, which is expected to close in the second quarter of this year, gives Wheels Up an enterprise value of $2.1 billion. Wheels Up is expected to receive $790 million in cash, including $240 million held by Aspirational and $550 million from Fidelity, HG Vora Capital and other investors. The company plans to use the funds to expand globally.
Following the merger, Wheels Up will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Aspirational advisers include Credit Suisse, while Goldman Sachs was an adviser to Wheels Up.
Wheels Up was founded by Kenny Dichter, a serial entrepreneur, in 2013. In 2001, he founded Marquis Jet, which enabled members to have fractional ownership of an aircraft for private flights. He sold the company to NetJets, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, in 2010.
That year Dichter co-founded Tequila Avion, a premium alcohol, which he sold to the French company Pernod Ricard for over $100 million in 2014. Earlier in his career, he founded Alphabet City, a sports marketing and music company, which he sold in 1998.
Last September, Ravi Thakran’s Aspirational Consumer raised $225 million for a Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle, or blank check company, through a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. He and the other founding investors own about $60 million of the stock.
Thakran, 58 years old, serves as the Group Chairman of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey Group (LVMH) South and South East Asia and Australia/New Zealand, representing a portfolio of over 75 luxury brands across multiple categories including Louis Vuitton, Moet Hennessy, Krug, Dom Perignon, Veuve Clicquot, Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Bulgari, TAG Heuer and Sephora.
“I didn’t know any of these (brands while growing up in a middle-class family in India]…I still remember my origins and keep my feet on the ground.” Thakran told The Australian Financial Review. He joined LVMH in 2001, serving in various leadership roles in Asia for the French company, which has a market value of $270 billion.
In 2009, Thakran founded L Capital Asia, the Asian private equity venture of LVMH. The fund invested $4 billion in 32 companies across Asia Pacific; including Charles & Keith, Gentle Monster, Bateel, YG Entertainment, Owndays Japan, Will’s Fitness China and FabIndia. In 2016, L Capital, including L Capital Asia, merged with Catterton to form L Catterton.
Thakran serves as Chairman of R.M. Williams, an Australian luxury footwear and apparel brand, and a director of numerous private companies, including Arcadia, owner of Dondup brand. Earlier, he served as a director on numerous public company boards, including SECOO China, Future Lifestyle Fashions, PVR Cinemas and South Korea’s Clio Cosmetics.
Prior to joining LVMH, he held senior management positions at the Swatch Group, Nike and Tata Group, based in various global locations.
Originally from a village outside Delhi, Thakran was an only child. His mother was a teacher and father a civil servant who advised farmers. His parents, who moved to New Delhi to give Thakran a better education, scraped and saved just enough of their meagre income to send Thakran to a good school and university, where he studied science and business before joining Tata Group, according to the Australian Financial Review.
“I only fully realised how much (my parents) sacrificed and how hard they worked” to put him through school when he became a parent, he told Classified Post (CP) Jobs, a Hongkong recruitment website. He learned his first words of English in Grade 6 and, given his late learning of the language, finished at the bottom of the class in middle school.
Apparently, none of the public information about Thakran identifies the college in Chandigarh, India where he studied veterinary science. His profile in the Aspirational documents, as well as other public sources, state that he earned his MBA from the India Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A).
While in college he was a socialist, Thakran told a group of alums of IIM Bangalore in 2018, according to a blogger who was at the lunch conversation held at the Yantra restaurant in Singapore; the blogger has also posted a photograph of the event. “I was in the fourth day of a hunger strike when I had my (admission) interview for the MBA at IIM,”Thakran told CP Jobs. The hunger strike was for better living conditions for students and sanitation and laundry workers on the campus. His student experiences, he says, shaped his view of pursuing capitalism with conscience.
Participating in student politics also sharpened Thakran’s people skills. For instance, to motivate staff at Sephora, the beauty products store-chain owned by LVMH, he set targets. If a day’s target was met, the staff could close the store half-an-hour early and have a champagne party. The staff at one store ended up having 69 champagne parties in one year, which upset the company’s finance chief. But Thakran continued with the practice, the blogger reported.
Thakran wanted members of India’s parliament to learn about the rapid advances in China’s economy. So, he reportedly bought them a subscription to the South China Morning Post. Only two of the 697 Indian law makers wrote to acknowledge Thakran’s effort, according to the blogger.
Growing up in New Delhi, Thakran was deeply influenced by the bustle in the city arising from the mingling of Indians from different religious, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. He told The Star that, “The diversity in New Delhi prepares you to be anywhere in the world…the classroom is not the only educational platform. When you walk on the streets, you see things that teach you a lot more about life.” .
Living in Singapore since 1994, Thakran collects art, especially magic realism-based street art from Colombia. Some of the paintings are displayed in his Singapore home, where he lives with his partner Holly Turner. They own Artitude, a gallery of Latin American art in Singapore, run by Turner, a former consultant at the local Red Sea gallery.
In 2015, Thakran told CP Jobs that his long-term plan was to return to India to work on social issues. “The final part of my journey will be back there (in India) working with some of the poorer people. I never forget my humble roots,” he said. So far there appears to be no public reports of his donating major funds to achieve philanthropic goals in India or elsewhere.
Last year, he told The Financial Times that he plans to raise a private equity fund of over $1 billion to invest in Asia 3.0, major global brands emerging in Asia.