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Online luxury retail isn’t dead, and the aspirational customer hasn’t gone for good either — at least according to British mass-market retailer Next, which launched a dedicated premium e-commerce site today. Seasons will carry contemporary and accessible luxury brands including Ganni, Coach and Marc Jacobs — the majority of which are not available on the Next site.
According to market research conducted by Next, 87 per cent of women outside of London feel underserved by the luxury sector. Seasons is hoping to offer a solution.
Behind the launch is Jade Taylor, a Next veteran who has been with the company for two decades and has run its third-party business for the past eight years. As brand director at Seasons, Taylor will report to Next’s executive director of group investments and acquisitions Jeremy Stakol, and has been working with luxury brand consultant Emma Ilori to execute Seasons’s branding and creative feel.
Taylor says that Next, which sees £1 billion in annual turnover, has witnessed a strong reception to some of the more premium brands in its offering. That interest, paired with solid customer service that includes perks like next-day delivery and same-day refunds, made a new site the “next logical move”, says Taylor. There’s also opportunity to move into higher-end luxury, she adds. But can the site succeed where others before it have failed?
We speak to Taylor about her vision for Seasons.
Who is the aspirational customer you’re serving with Seasons, and how are their needs not currently served?
[Next has] a broad customer base — eight million people globally and six million in the UK. The sweet spot [for Seasons] is a female millennial consumer who has a family and a very busy life. We’ve recognised that with Seasons we need to give a more edited view of brands — bringing lots of brands onto the platform but having a curated offer where we’ve selected the absolute best pieces and put together guides to make styling easy for consumers. Ultimately, our vision for Seasons is to be the fashion destination for millennial women who are interested in fashion but want to shop somewhere they trust. Everything’s moved into marketplace models with lots of options and less curation.
Curation is sometimes associated with the higher end of luxury rather than the aspirational customer.
Ultimately, it’s about amazing product — the role of Seasons is to bring that product to the consumers that we already have in our database who maybe don’t have retail stores in the towns where they live. We have a very regional customer base, we’re not particularly London-centric. If you’re outside of London, you probably haven’t got access to lots of contemporary luxury brands outside of the superbrands that everybody knows. So I think Seasons can give awareness to some of the contemporary labels.
What do you make of the Flannels comparisons?
Flannels do an amazing job at what they do, but we’re not necessarily seeing Seasons as what Flannels does because we’re focusing on the female customer that we already have in our customer base and bringing new brands to serve her.
What was it like getting brands on board?
We put together the vision for what the website would look like and everybody loved the aesthetic and the idea of having curated edits. Because it wasn’t a website that people could go and look at, there was a lot of trust in those conversations; but on the whole, the brands have been extremely supportive.
We’ve got a vision to move into the luxury superbrands, and we’re in conversations with the Kering and Richemont brands. I think it’s a matter of doing it when the market is right and the timing is right for those brands as well. There’s lots of turmoil in the luxury market.
The online luxury retail space has seen some serious challenges over the past year. Given that, why was now the right time to launch?
We’re seeing our [highest] price points within the Next portfolio working really well, and we can see the consumer wants to shop at more premium price points, so we felt it was the right time to move into more aspirational brands. I think the challenges other platforms have faced, we won’t have initially because Next has such a loyal customer base who come to the website everyday. We won’t have to pay for acquisition and spend a lot of money on marketing, and that’s possibly what could set us apart from other websites.
The brand curation is very different to Next, but what backend operations will Seasons draw on?
All of the infrastructure, logistics, warehousing, everything is powered by Next, which is what Next is amazing at. It’s the photography and look and feel of the website that’s different — we have a separate team who are managing the aesthetic DNA of Seasons to make sure we achieve the luxury aesthetic. [With Next’s backend infrastructure], we can really focus on the brand mix, the product and the curation, and put all our energy into making that really successful. Our team hasn’t really struggled with Seasons because we have all the right infrastructure to make it work.
Tell me more about the business model.
Everything is wholesale from the beginning, because we want to take the risk on the buy. We have the ability to move to commission and do marketplace; Next’s branded business label has a mixture, so we have the infrastructure. But at the moment, Seasons is on a wholesale basis.
We’ve kept the initial buys relatively small. For this to work it needs to be a full-price website from a profitability point of view, but also a brand point of view, to make sure we’re selling the majority of stock at full price. We’ll work exactly in line with the Next ethos where there will be two discounting points in the year to clear fashion lines that aren’t continuing into the next season, but it will be a largely full-price website without any promotional activity.
What’s the vision for expanding Seasons?
For the initial launch it’s all online and at this moment we don’t have any plans to move anything into retail stores. Over the next six months it will be about learning how Seasons works, which brands resonate with the consumer, as well as bringing new brands on board and learning about their product mix. We’re very much in the testing-and-learning stage. If it’s very successful and we see an opportunity to move it into retail space, that would be the right thing to do — but we haven’t got any plans at the moment.
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