Luxury online retailer Net-A-Porter will soon be making a home on one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites.
On Monday, YOOX Net-A-Porter Group’s parent company, Richemont, and Chinese mega-retailer Alibaba announced the upcoming launch of Net-A-Porter’s flagship on Tmall Luxury Pavilion. The online store will go live the second week of October.
The joint partnership, which has been dubbed Feng Mao, aims to bring Net-A-Porter’s iconic sartorial savez-faire to China’s increasingly hungry luxury consumer. At launch, the store will offer more than 130 designer brands for men and women — a number that will grow with the partnership and will include exclusive capsule collections as well.
Brands such as Brunello Cucinelli, The Row, Balmain, Isabel Marant, Jimmy Choo and Tom Ford, along with Richemont brands including Cartier, Baume & Mercier, IWC Schaffhausen, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Panerai, Piaget, Roger Dubuis, Vacheron Constantin, Alaïa, Chloé, Dunhill and Montblanc will be available upon the flagship’s launch.
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The Net-A-Porter shopping experience on Tmall Luxury Pavilion will include curated homepages and brand pages, along with product recommendations, personalized content and exclusive VIP rewards. Powered by Alibaba’s extensive tech infrastructure, the Net-A-Porter online store will enable shoppers to check out using Alipay, the company’s mobile payment solution, to fund their purchases.
“This partnership between Alibaba and YOOX Net-A-Porter is bringing Chinese consumers unprecedented access to the world’s leading luxury brands,” Jiang Fan, president of Taobao and Tmall, said.
“Together, we will deliver an elevated, seamless and rich luxury experience for Chinese consumers. We are confident this flagship store opening is just the beginning of a longterm partnership that will benefit China’s luxury consumers and the world’s luxury brands who want to reach them,” he added.
“Net-A-Porter’s flagship store on Tmall Luxury Pavilion will become the online destination where luxury brands want to be in China,” Federico Marchetti, chairman and CEO of YOOX Net-A-Porter Group, said. “Chinese shoppers can explore a unique selection of the world’s most desirable brands carefully curated just for them, enhanced by an unmatched personalized experience and exclusive products that cannot be found elsewhere.”
In recent months Tmall Luxury Pavilion has been padding its brand roster to include makers of products ranging from apparel and beauty to watches and cars. The fast-growing luxury market is bolstered in large part by Chinese millennial and Gen Z consumers, who make up 45% of the global market.
Launched in 2017, the platform features brands such as Chanel, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Tod’s, Versace, Stella McCartney, Moschino, Giuseppe Zanotti, MCM, Maserati, Rimowa, Michael Kors and more. In July, the company announced that it plans to double the number of brands on the Pavilion by March 2020, the end of its fiscal year.
Editor’s Note: This story was reported by FN sister magazine Sourcing Journal. For more, visit Sourcingjournal.com.
