Bestseller, the privately held Danish retail group controlled by billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, is accelerating its Portuguese build-out. The Aarhus-headquartered company is rolling out 10 standalone Vero Moda stores across Portugal by 2027, with an estimated 80 new direct jobs attached, while sister brand Jack & Jones is on track to hit its own 10-store milestone in the country during the first quarter of this year. Together, the two banners are turning Portugal into the most active Nordic-owned high-street fashion footprint outside Spain.
The Vero Moda rollout reverses what until recently was a wholesale-only strategy in Portugal. The brand has been sold for years through Portuguese multi-brand retailers, but Bestseller has now decided that the country’s shopping-centre traffic, tourist spend and disposable-income recovery justify direct retail. Standalone stores capture full margin, allow brand experience control, and give the group its own customer data — a recurring theme across the Bestseller portfolio.
Jack & Jones moved first. The Danish menswear brand opened its first directly operated Portuguese store at Lisbon’s Centro Colombo, then scaled fast: NorteShopping in Matosinhos, Arrábida Shopping in Vila Nova de Gaia and a series of further units in Greater Porto and the Algarve. Bestseller publicly committed to 10 Jack & Jones stores in Portugal by Q1 2026, a target the group has indicated it expects to hit on schedule. Vero Moda’s plan tracks the same template, with a longer 2027 horizon to allow for prime-mall site availability.
The strategic context is Anders Holch Povlsen himself. The Bestseller chairman is the largest single shareholder of British online fashion group ASOS, the largest landowner in Scotland, and one of Northern Europe’s most active retail and tech investors. Through Heartland, his family office, he controls Bestseller, Bestseller’s German online unit Zalando shareholding, and a sprawling property portfolio. Portugal sits inside a European retail strategy that runs across more than 45 countries and roughly 17,000 multi-brand retail partners.
Why Portugal, and why now. Three factors are pulling Bestseller deeper into the country. First, Portuguese household consumption has held up better than the eurozone average, with strong tourism-driven retail demand in Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve. Second, mall operators — Sonae Sierra, Klépierre, CBRE-managed assets — have been actively offering improved economics to recognisable international banners that drive footfall. Third, the country has become a manufacturing and sourcing hub for the wider Bestseller supply chain, with several Portuguese textile suppliers in the group’s vendor network. Direct retail builds on supply chain familiarity already in place.
For the Portuguese fashion ecosystem, Bestseller’s push is double-edged. On one hand, it accelerates international competition for legacy multi-brand retailers and forces them to defend share. On the other hand, it validates Portugal as a Tier-1 European retail market, which tends to attract further entrants. JYSK, the Danish home-furnishings chain, is on a separate trajectory toward 40 stores in the country, while H&M, IKEA and Inditex continue to invest. Bestseller’s expansion will pull more Nordic and Continental retail behind it.
The Iberian context matters. Bestseller has long treated Iberia as a single operational unit, with logistics flowing from Iberian distribution into both Spain and Portugal. The group’s scale in Spain — where Vero Moda, Jack & Jones, Only and Selected operate hundreds of points of sale — gives Portugal real operational leverage. New Portuguese stores can be served from existing Iberian warehousing without significant fixed-cost expansion, which is one reason the unit-economics of the rollout pencil out at a comparatively cautious 10-store target rather than a more aggressive number.
What to watch over the next 12-18 months: store-by-store productivity in newly opened Portuguese Vero Moda units, the choice of cities beyond Lisbon and Porto (Coimbra, Braga and Faro are obvious candidates), and any signal that Bestseller’s broader portfolio — Selected, Only, Mamalicious or Pieces — might follow the same direct-retail playbook into Portugal. Bestseller has not historically broadcast detailed market-by-market plans, but the Portuguese pattern of wholesale-then-retail is now well established, and other group brands could plausibly repeat it.
For the Nordic-Iberian corridor, the Bestseller story is a useful reminder that retail is one of the deepest and longest-running threads of capital and operational flow between Scandinavia and Portugal. It is less headline-grabbing than green hydrogen, defence aerospace or AI healthtech, but in steady employment, mall economics and consumer brand presence, Danish-owned retail is doing as much to anchor the corridor as any of the more visible deals.