40 Percent of Luxury Brands Still Aren’t Sold Online
You’re able to order everything from a toothbrush to a piano with a click of your mouse, so it’s pretty surprising that there are still quite a few luxury brands that aren’t selling their goods online.
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Bloomberg Businessweek reported on a Bain study that concluded roughly 40 percent of luxury brands aren’t selling online including biggies like Chanel and Céline (though the former does sell makeup and fragrances online). Chanel, for one, has always maintained that it doesn’t sell goods online because the in-store shopping experience—personal fashion advice, alterations, and the like—can’t be replicated on the web.
Instead, the study found that many luxury brands have been focused in recent years on opening brick-and-mortar stores in emerging markets like China.
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One analyst, Luca Solca of French bank BNP Paribas, called digital “the next China,” predicting that e-commerce could bring in around $43 billion between now and the year 2020 for brands that have yet to embrace digital. In other words, there are a heck of lot of people that certainly would like to buy a Chanel 2.55 bag with the click of a mouse, so why not let them?
