-Most of Chanel’s clients are not here at the show (…)
-Who are they?
-New money. Mountains of money. People so rich that they don’t even know what they have (…) They are not red carpet. When you put a dress on the red carpet they cancel their order immediately.
This conversation was held by Karl Lagerfel, then creative director of Chanel, and the journalist Dana Thomas, author of the book How luxury lost its splendor (Editorial Superflua, 2023). They were at a French fashion show and the dialogue describes the usual luxury consumer: she doesn’t want to look like anyone. “If something exists in red, she will want it in white, she is looking for something special for herself, something where there are not dozens of the same thing,” Lagerfeld confesses to Thomas.
“For me, luxury is something you try to achieve, but it is unattainable,” Ilse Metchek, then executive director of the California Fashion Association, also tells Dana Thomas, and concludes: “in the past, luxury was something you really wanted.”
The classic idea of ??luxury alluded to something precious, expensive, artisanal, scarce, exclusive, not very accessible… until the Internet arrived. How to make that definition compatible with a network that is the complete opposite: abundance, repetition, copy, chaos, accessibility.
It is not surprising that luxury brands took so long to open their online stores. Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior did it in 2005 but only in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Hermès, in 2002 in the United States and in 2005 in France, but only to sell its cars and perfumes. Gucci, in 2003 only for accessories, and Bottega Venetta in 2005.
In 2010, social media and the influencer economy arrived, and things became even more confusing. Luxury brands, always so careful with their history and heritage, began to fear losing control of their image. Celine, still with an accent and led by Phoebe Philo, waited until 2017 to open an Instagram account and Bottegga Veneta has developed a love-hate relationship with that platform, from which she left angrily in 2021 to return in 2023 with her tail between her legs. . Luxury brands pluck the daisy, enter and exit Instagram and TikTok like anyone unsubscribes and unsubscribes from Tinder. They know they have to be there, but many of them just don’t feel comfortable.
A unique case is that of Phoebe Philo. Outside of Celine, who lost her accent in the first e, she opened an Instagram account for her new brand, of the same name, where to this day no activity has been reported. However, she already has more than 200,000 followers eager to see how this visionary is going to deploy her idea of ??luxury on Instagram.
It is difficult to replicate an analogue and three-dimensional luxury experience on the two-dimensional and crowded Internet, where there is speed and convenience, but touch, smell and in general the dream and the idea of ??exclusivity are missing.
The first to break the curse was Natalie Massenet, creator of the Net-á-Porter portal. In 1998 she had a revelation, there were women in the Middle East who traveled to Paris and London twice a year to buy luxury, wouldn’t it be fantastic if they could buy them from home and receive them in a few days, in their perfect bags and packaging, just as Would they have bought it in the store?
For Massenet that would be a real luxury. In 2010 she created a website that was a full-fledged magazine, where the description of each article was the combination of a masterpiece of fashion journalism with a masterful advertising advertisement. “You have to maintain the illusion. If you reduce it to clothing, all the magic is lost and it becomes an ordinary item. The rest is history. In 2015 she joined forces with Yoox and they formed the largest online sales portal for luxury items.
Of all the websites that emerged around that time, including eLuxury.com, the San Francisco-based platform from where Bernad Arnauld wanted to sell LVMH brands, only Net-á-porter survived, small and discreet, with little fixed structure. of expenses and a flexibility that was useful to adapt to the lurches that the luxury of the Internet would still bring.
When the Luxury Digital Congress, organized by the Spanish Luxury Association, was held in Madrid last May, there was no longer a discussion about whether brands had to be on the Internet or not; in any case, the conflict was how to continue being exclusive luxury brands at despite the Internet. Its speakers, mostly representatives of luxury brands or lifestyle magazines, explained their strategies to replicate the sophistication and exceptionality of luxury on the Internet.
Everyone talked about excellence and technical quality because on the Internet if the page is slow or crashes, the experience is no longer soft (smooth, pleasant), something that luxury consumers do not forgive. For them life is always soft. They all agreed that the pandemic was the event that finally convinced luxury that they could no longer delay their digitalization. According to forecasts from the statistics portal Statista, by the end of 2030 more than half of luxury purchases will be completely online.
A great challenge for luxury brands has been the demographic change. Its clientele has been renewed with the arrival of millennials and with Generation Zeta already hot on its heels. Between them they exceed half of the premium market. And the younger generations like other things. Obviously they show a broad preference for buying luxury (and everything else) almost exclusively online, but they also have other values: younger people are more interested in the experiences that an object can provide than in the prestige or legacy of a big brand.
The other thing they want to know before consuming a brand is how sustainable it is, where it is produced, who sews a bag or who cuts the shape of a shoe. All of this falls into their particular definition of luxury. Two messages, experiences and sustainability, difficult to translate into binary digital language.
Buying luxury online should be as pleasant as entering a boutique where the customer is greeted with a glass of French champagne and led to the cash register along a soft, neutral-colored carpet. This feeling of comfort on the Internet is summarized in what experts call “the digital journey.”
On a website that sells luxury items, everything has to go smoothly, there can be no errors, no slow pages that crash, or apps that crash. The digital journey has to be fast, smooth, without setbacks. The consulting firm Équité Research assures that 95% of the sales of luxury products depend on it.
A digital journey is good if the technical issues work, but also if the customer feels distinguished. That is why personalization is key in luxury brands. The VIP client must be taken out of the Internet jungle. So brands invest in erasing any vestige of anonymity from their potential digital customers, and try to elevate the shopping experience on their page with any means at their disposal. Once the purchase is completed, luxury returns to the analog world. The VIP customer expects to have their purchase at home in accordance with all the codes of classic luxury: in a few days and wrapped in scented tissue papers. No more no less.
