DIGITAL
When the Improbable Is Also Profitable
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Oscar de la Renta’s CEO, Alex Bolen, explains why e-commerce works for the most unlikely of products and how social media serves the fashion brand’s designers and merchandisers Oscar de…
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Oscar de la Renta’s CEO, Alex Bolen, explains why e-commerce works for the most unlikely of products and how social media serves the fashion brand’s designers and merchandisers
Oscar de la Renta’s CEO, Alex Bolen, explains why e-commerce works for the most unlikely of products and how social media serves the fashion brand’s designers and merchandisers
Because today’s luxury goods consumers are present across numerous channels, being there for them wherever they may be is a crucial aspect of business to get right, says Alex Bolen, Oscar de la Renta’s chief executive – and the man responsible for the fashion brand’s foray into e-commerce and social media.
“Our presence online has suggested to me that consumers are very quickly adjusting their behaviour to new modes of shopping and we need to really be out at the forefront of it. We have had many surprise anecdotes from having our brand online, anything from a $50,000 chinchilla coat sale through our website to completing a sale for a bridal dress via Twitter.”
For many luxury fashion brands, e-commerce has still not yet eclipsed the performance of physical stores but a very significant consumer appetite is present.
“ Our customer has taught us that there are moments where she will want to spend hours in a store shopping and there are moments where it’s a quick impulsive purchase ”
“When we first began thinking about e-commerce three to four years ago I was very sceptical that our brand would not fare well as, at that time, we were not particularly optimized in products that don’t have size requirements. Our bread and butter product is a $4 – 5,000 cocktail dress which is very fit intensive, in fact the perfectly fitted garment is an important part of our brand and this is something that seemed to me didn’t jive well with an online shopping experience.”
“I was wrong about that. Surprisingly we have had a very good reaction to our fit intensive products online. What we found in retrospect is that customers will order two different sizes and keep one of them.”
“Our customer has taught us that there are moments where she will want to spend hours in a store shopping and there are moments where it’s a quick impulsive purchase – as a luxury brand it’s important to us that we are present wherever our customer is.”
According to Bolen, e-commerce currently drives only 10% of the luxury fashion brand but it is growing very quickly. In a relatively short period of time, he forecasts Oscardelarenta.com to become the brand’s most prolific door.
One of the ways that the brand is extending its outreach to drive customers back to the site is through social media. Oscar de la Renta has taken a very creative approach to emerging media platforms such as creating a unique online personality for the brand on Twitter called OscarPRgirl. The brand uses Twitter as a channel to provide unique insight into the world of Oscar de la Renta and to engage with entirely new audiences as well supporting the interests of existing ones.
“As a brand, we want to augment the initiatives online started by OscarPRgirl and speak more about what we are doing by explaining what our brand is about in more than just 140 characters. This means we want to extend our communications to areas such as rich video content and audio content.”
“I am a big believer that you have to listen to your customers, and the online world has given us a new way to listen to our customers and we have learned to position ourselves based on what we hear.”
