Lydia Lee
Spend shamelessly.com
LVMH quietly launches Eluxury.com, but will anyone buy a $17,000 watch on the Web?
The gluttonous orgy that was the e-commerce revolution may have finally come to an end, but that hasn’t stopped Eluxury.com from swaggering into the soiree.
As high-profile guests drop like flies from the Web party, France’s LVMH (aka Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey, parent company of such gilded names as TAG Heuer, Celine and Sephora) is boldly moving ahead in the flashiest of frocks. Its latest venture? Convincing the moneyed class to buy luxury goods the new-fashioned way: online.
Don’t expect the Parisian luxury purveyor to make a splash — at least not yet. Eluxury.com launched late last month, but LVMH won’t begin marketing it until the fall. Nevertheless, the site now hawks a wide range of designer items with eye-popping price tags. Why the soft launch? Perhaps amid the doom and gloom, LVMH understands that selling $17,000 Bulgari watches, $900 Louis Vuitton pooch carriers or $100 La Perla undies may be seen as a little tactless.
But market faux pas or not, this is no nouveau riche VC experiment. Through Eluxury.com, LVMH plans to aggressively showcase and sell the latest collections of its key brands, including Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy, to name a few.
Parental clout does give Eluxury.com a bit of an edge. Online retailers have traditionally been stuck with last season’s leftovers, if only because designers fear that selling their wares on the Web is tacky. Although competitor LuxuryFinder.com now sells over 60 brands, including fine linens by Frette and Brioni menswear, Eluxury should have an advantage because LVMH boasts many of the world’s most prestigious brands.
That doesn’t mean Eluxury.com has a market. LVMH found out with its investment in the now-defunct Boo.com that selling high-end goods on the Internet takes more than a snazzy business plan. And Eluxury.com plans to sell everything at full retail price, so not only must customers do without a salesperson fawning over them in the dressing room, but they won’t even get a price break.
What they do get when they visit are virtual representations of products hidden behind elaborate graphics, along with custom editorial content designed to put them in an expensive frame of mind. Those who go to the travel section, for example, can read an article about renting a castle in Scotland, just in case they had that fancy.
For its part, the shopping experience is pretty mundane. Take this $235 La Perla bra and “Add to Shopping Bag.” Fill in quantity and size. Send. Click-click-click. What’s not cut and dried, however, is the cost. An experimental shopping excursion came out to $18,644.00 (including $1,419 in taxes and $25 in shipping). Yikes!
Jim Conte, Eluxury’s senior vice president of marketing and business development, says the site’s typical customer is a “current buyer of luxury goods and services, as well as the aspirational buyer.”
Nice customers … if you can get them.
Neither LuxuryFinder.com, which has been around for nearly a year, or the 2-year-old Ashford.com has earned a penny. And despite rising sales and predictions of profitability at the end of next year, the luxury sector is particularly sensitive to economic downturns.
Then there’s that nagging question: Who in the world would buy a $17,000 watch on the Web?
“The luxury market is not about the expense — it’s about feeling good,” insists James Finkelstein, the president of LuxuryFinder.com. “I don’t think it’s an either-or situation. People enjoy going to a shop. They also enjoy shopping on the Web. You can’t go to Bond Street or Madison Avenue or Beverly Hills every week anyway.”
Raging youths tune in to aging soaps
Can Hottie and Trouble pull in the ratings for daytime TV?
Fed up with fish
Fish and chips franchiser Arthur Treacher’s has traded in its deep fryers to start a new chips business — the computer kind, says the Wall Street Journal. By changing its name to Digital Creative Development Corp., the company is reinventing itself as a Web site development firm. Ralph Sorrentino, who was tapped to launch the digital business, admits the transformation seemed odd at first, but says he then realized the publicly traded fast-food purveyor provided a “pretty clean shell.”
Boo hoo!
Over-the-top design and a burn rate of $120 million in six months force the achingly hip fashion retail site to give up the ghost.
The fashion retail site Boo.com was laid to rest Wednesday, after reportedly burning through $120 million in a mere six months. The Web’s first immersive retail environment had its own online guide (Miss Boo), its own online magazine (Boom) and some of the hippest clothing brands. But it was wildy overdesigned, difficult to navigate and completely out of touch with most Web retailers’ vision of quick shopping and ease of use.
Shoppers and analysts alike found Boo overly ambitious and few were surprised by staff cuts announced in January. Still, the death of this short-lived, high-profile venture marks Europe’s first major dot-com failure. With big-name backers like Benetton and Bernard Arnault, the famed chairman of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, Boo.com was one of the most publicized e-commerce efforts.
Continue Reading CloseSpam virgin
In which we offer up sacrificial e-mail addresses and are spurned by the bulk e-mailing gods.
How long does it take a fresh new e-mail address to get spam? We decided to find out by creating a fictitious new Salon staffer, Wallis Sanford (a nod, of course, to the once notorious Spam King Sanford Wallace). We wanted our new “junior staff writer” to live life dangerously on the Web and see how quickly he fell victim to spammers. So we set him up with new accounts on America Online and Hotmail. We also set up a Geocities home page, posted a question on Usenet, and put him on the Salon masthead — in each case, listing a separate Salon e-mail address set up expressly to collect spam. Then we sat back and waited to see which of the five lures would get the first bite.
Continue Reading CloseTasty spam?
If companies served up e-mail right, consumers would beg for it, says Hans Peter Br
Post Communications sends out millions of e-mails each week, for Web retailers like Petopia and CDNow. You might consider these commercial solicitations just another form of spam, contributions to the deluge of “get rich quick” missives, pornographic solicitations and other motley messages that fill e-mail boxes everywhere.
But talk to Hans Peter Brxndmo, 37, founder and chairman of Post Communications, and you might be persuaded that this e-mail is a great service to you. Brxndmo may be an e-mail marketer, but he’s as passionately anti-spam as any frustrated user could be. “Spam is unsolicited, unwanted, unexpected and soon to be unlawful e-mail,” says Brxndmo. “What we do is help companies establish communications with existing customers — everyone has signed up and given permission for the company to communicate with them.” But even legitimate companies, Brxndmo adds, send too many e-mails.” If companies keep sending users so much mail, then users will stop responding, just as they stopped clicking on banner ads.”
Continue Reading CloseA vote for Bill is a vote for more (dollar) bills
Microsoft is on the campaign trail, hustling for a better public opinion.
Presidential campaigning is on hiatus until later this year, but that isn’t stopping some people who’ve got plenty of money in their coffers from getting up close and personal with TV-watching Americans. “Twenty-five years ago, my friends and I started with nothing but an idea — that we could harness the power of the PC to improve people’s lives,” says Bill Gates in his high-pitched nasal voice, as acoustic guitar plays gently in the background. For 30 seconds, the richest man in the world makes an unspecified appeal to the American people, an unspecified appeal whose message is readily apparent to most anyone who has seen the new TV commercial.
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