Au revoir buses of Chinese tourists on the Champs Elysées. Welcome virtual personal shopping!
Au revoir Fashion Weeks, reuniting ‘la crème de la crème’ in the fashion capitals. Welcome live streamed cat walks!
In reaction to lockdown store closures and social distancing, luxury brands like Harrods and Prada have imagined new ways to engage with their consumers accelerating the digital transformation which started 20 years ago.
According to the Business of Fashion, the luxury industry went through 3 waves of innovation. First the wholesale luxury business went digital with Net-a-porter as its poster child. Then challengers like Farfetch launched e-luxury platforms. Finally, the past 10 years have been the stage of interesting business models disruption – from renting haute couture with Rent the Runway, to peer-to-peer luxury goods marketplace like Depop, and new D2C brands like Aurate. All this time, traditional luxury brands have been selling through hybrid models combining traditional retail and direct-to-consumer sales in physical flagship stores.
Today, it looks like the cards are being redistributed. According to Bain & Company, online luxury sales are forecasted to take 25% of the market by 2025 while department stores decline. And, consumers are using that opportunity to shop directly with the brands, increasing their online market share, at the expense of retailers. Brands like Gucci and Saint Laurent have invested heavily in developing unique e-commerce experiences that are integrated with their online marketing and social media platforms.
Selling online is not complex… for a ‘regular’ brand. However, when a big part of what your consumers buy is a premium shopping experience with best-in-class service in a beautiful store, translating it online becomes a challenge. And I can imagine that is what luxury brands have been trying to solve for years: how do we maintain the same level of prestige and deliver high-end experiences digitally so that consumers don’t feel they got their experience robbed?
Some brands like Chanel have famously refused to sell its clothing, bags and shoes online, and only very recently began investing heavily in its online experience. Others are experimenting, like Gucci, using augmented reality technology to let the consumers try on shoes and allowing them to buy directly from the app, or Celine whose e-commerce imagery is set as a fashion lookbook. These mechanisms are nice but feel gimmicky and don’t answer the bigger question: how can luxury brands shift from a mostly physical experience to an omnichannel experience?
Let’s learn from the media industry. In the last century, it was selling physical products (newspapers and magazines) delivered regularly to your door or bought at the train station. The digitalisation of the economy made news free, dematerialised and accessible to anyone with internet access. Media had to reinvent their value proposition, leveraging their unique assets – journalists, community, etc, as well as organise themselves differently to deliver such propositions to their consumers. They learnt how to monetise quality, exclusivity and access. For example, WSJ+ offers exclusive premium perks for members including invites to member-only events, access to Journal-hosted talks, private museum tours and discounts on luxury goods.
Having helped numerous brands invent new direct-to-consumer propositions in the media and consumer goods industry, there are 4 key elements that need to be considered.
It is about creating long term relationships, not a high volume of one-off transactions.
The two sides of the coin need to be balanced to ensure profitability and contribution to growth.
Many consumers will have changed their habits during the pandemic and will likely keep them at least for a while. Hopefully luxury brands can use the next few months as an opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation.