As revealed yesterday, Richemont is buying the lion’s share (67 percent) of online fashion retailer Net-a-Porter.A key article in the Financial Times (Ready For The Next Chapter In E-Tailing) explored this smart move, concluding that Richemont “became the first leading luxury conglomerate to purchase a multi-brand virtual store, taking the industry's involvement with the web to a new level.”
The article also highlighted some interesting stats, including that Net-a-Porter “has 3.3 million unique users a month, and is growing by approximately 10,000 new customers per month.”
This is impressive. If we break this down by an average from the leading 'luxury brand' flagships in Australia where the stores receive 7-10K per month of traffic arrivals, versus 3.3 million a month. It is increasingly difficult to compete in this landscape and this is why luxury brands more than ever must embrace their own online retail offer. They need to offer more products online in addition to their bricks and mortar stores, they should increase their own share of the tarte tatin ... Hence why again we reiterate Richemont's smart move in this direction to manage wholesale, retail and virtual retail.
