Chanel Overcomes its eCommerce Snobbery

Muchaneta Kapfunde | @FashNerdEditor

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Luxury brands have the reputation of taking the smallest babysteps when it comes to ecommerce. With an air of slight snobbery brands like Céline, Dior, and Chanel are well known for keeping their collections offline. They would simply blush at the thought of selling their exclusive wares on such a Wide World Web.

Now with fashion moving online with confidence, Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, told WWD that customers should expect Chanel to finally launch its e-commerce business in late 2016. They will start of with an edited collection that I hope will include their iconic quilted handbags and classic tweed dresses. Pavlovsky also confirmed that their Paraffection subsidiary, the glove-maker Causse, milliner Maison Michel, and cashmere house Barrie Knitwear, will also have their own separate e-commerce sites.

When it comes to luxury labels selling online, Flur Roberts, Euromonitor’s head of luxury goods and Exane BNP Paribas analyst Luca Solca believe that the vast majority of luxury purchases will still continue to be in-store.

With the announcement of luxury e-commerce brands Net-a-Porter and Yoox merging, Chanel should learn from the success they have had selling luxury online because only then will they be able to follow in the expensive stilleto steps of the now renamed Yoox Net a Porter.

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