For two and a half decades, fashion e-commerce has barely changed. We still shop online through static product pages, while the way we advertise and discover brands has shifted from traditional media to social media steered by algorithms. But 2025 is undergoing a reckoning. A growing number of fashion experts and investors believe that consumer scroll fatigue and AI skepticism are leading us into a new era of social commerce — where a trusted individual’s curation becomes sought after to cut through the noise and make easier shopping decisions.
Few people have followed this trend as closely as Kay Barron, who spent the last 12 and a half years at Net-a-Porter overseeing fashion features and shopping.
“It’s all about curation,” Barron says. “We may work in fashion and take it for granted, but in reality, people are time poor and want to find out how to put clothes together.”
Now, Barron has left her position as fashion director to launch her own video commerce agency, Vvend. The agency will act as a creative and strategic partner for fashion brands wanting to sell through live video and shoppable video content. It comes after Barron spent the last five years scaling Net-a-Porter’s own live-shopping feature, leading her to become known as “KVC” for her regular hosting of the multi-brand retailer’s live sessions. Vvend has partnered with video commerce platform Bambuser to provide the technical infrastructure for live-shopping sessions — the platform Barron worked with at Net-a-Porter, where she says it brought significant return on investment (ROI) through increased sales and fewer returns.
While live-stream shopping has been big in China for almost a decade, popularized by Alibaba-owned shopping site Taobao, the concept has been slower to take off in the West. Platforms have excelled at fueling big business for amateur collectibles sellers, but struggled to move upstream and become part of luxury’s e-commerce playbook. Experts say much of this is down to Western platforms attempting to carbon copy what’s worked in China, rather than building unique user value for the shopper in the West.
Working at luxury site Net-a-Porter, Barron witnessed the tech’s serious revenue-generating potential. The retailer’s live-shopping videos had a 20% higher click-through rate versus other content types, Barron tells Vogue Business, and Bambuser’s data shows Instagram users are nine times more likely to purchase from watching a live stream than they are from another piece of content. Other startups are claiming ground in the space: LA-based live-streaming platform Whatnot raised $225 million in funding at a $11.5 billion valuation last week.
“I loved the fact there’s a connection with the consumer and you can see the results in real time,” says Barron. “When I saw how successful it was getting, I thought there’s definitely something here that could be bigger.”
Barron has been plotting Vvend and building out a team behind the scenes for the last two years. On Tuesday, the agency launches with a small team of producers and creatives based in London and New York. Vvend will work with brands to develop what Barron calls their “shopping entertainment strategies”, and depending on the size of the brand, can work on either a retainer or a project basis. Vvend will then implement the strategy, and brands can opt in to any of its video production services, including creative direction, casting, scripting and editing. The agency will work with brands on both video content for platforms like Instagram, as well as live-stream shopping on Bambuser. Barron says Vvend’s conversations with brands from her and Bambuser’s networks are “quite far down the line”, with some due to be announced soon.
“I feel like resistance is futile when it comes to live shopping. We see how big it is in China and now it’s really taking off in the US with Whatnot and TikTok Shop, but it’s all of a certain level,” Barron says. “But I’ve seen firsthand with luxury how much revenue it can drive and how the ROI is incredible. Consumers really relate to it. It can be a real commercial hit.”
I sat down with Barron to learn more about Vvend and her view on the future of video commerce for luxury.
Vogue: Why do you think live video sells better than other content?
It’s all about the curation and the human connection. When you’re talking on video about whether something runs bigger or smaller, seeing the clothes and the fabric move, and even having an interaction between two people talking about different styles, that just can’t be underestimated. You’re giving people as much information as possible, which you can’t get from a still or a simple moving image.
I find it so fascinating, how to sell things to people and how people engage with what they want to buy. The human connection is so important and I think it’s even more integral now. Live shopping is just doing it in a different way, because people are still time poor. It can make someone feel like they are the only person in that store, basically with their own personal shopper.
Vogue: What kinds of consumers are buying luxury through live shopping?
Although younger consumers are the power users for platforms like TikTok and Whatnot, I’ve found that with live shopping for luxury, the consumers that tune in are those who already engage with a brand. That’s often a slightly older demographic, 30s into 40s. So brands should think of it as a way of communicating consistently, rather than necessarily a way of bringing in new customers — although, that can then happen through social channels by repurposing the live content. The people who are watching those lives are customers who are invested in the brand and know it, and they’re tuning in because they want to see what the offer is, what someone’s talking about and how they’re putting it together.
Vogue: Why do you think luxury has been slow to experiment with video shopping?
I think because often it’s people in their houses, it’s scrappy, so brands look at that and think, “Oh god, that’s not for us.” But there are so many different entry points for live shopping. It can be personal shoppers doing one-to-one appointments with clients, or a one-to-many video or even customer service. The most important thing is having that video and human connection. It works hand-in-hand with developments in AI and how you sell products elsewhere. It’s about finding the right treatment, the right concept, the creative, the host’s scripting — and that’s just live shopping.
Then, with shoppable video, the same approach applies. There’s a way to apply the same luxury and editorial credibility from the rest of a brand’s content to live shopping and shoppable video. And by choosing their hosts and scripting, brands can actually have more creative control than some partnerships with creators, who are not always the best people to sell their product.
So many brands also have these incredible flagship stores that are already merchandized, everything’s been approved at every single level. On a Tuesday morning, they may be empty, so then you’ve got a video set there. Sometimes, brands are scared because they hear “video” and immediately think a production with 800 people that’s going to be expensive. But actually, they’re sitting on stores that can instantly be turned into studios for something that looks really curated. We’ve seen Whatsapp used by personal shoppers to constantly communicate with luxury clients — video commerce feels like the next step to me.
Anything new and tech focused in fashion usually takes a while to land, because luxury is wary of change. But sometimes, all it takes is for one big luxury brand to experiment and then it opens the floodgates to everyone else trying it. We do love a trend. I think we need to be more in the mindset of: what’s the worst that could happen?
Vogue: What does the future of e-commerce look like, in your opinion?
Brands are doing such brilliant videos, and product placement is everywhere. But the consumer is being entertained and sucked into a world through video, and they want to buy the wonderful bag they see without having to come out. I think there’s a huge opportunity for enabling commerce where the consumer doesn’t have to come out of the world you’ve created. Imagine you’re watching a film and can click on your screen to instantly buy the shirt the main character is wearing. I’m sure there’s a very clever tech person somewhere working on that.
In the more immediate term, I’m observing the new wave of creator storefront platforms and see it’s also all about making it as easy as possible for the consumer to shop. We know how lazy we are — if you have to click out to something, we’re vanished and completely distracted by something else. The future of commerce is about finding the people whose taste and edit is right for you, and then making it easier to shop from that. I feel like here there can be crossover. At this point, when all this tech still feels very new, it should be a space where everyone’s helping each other. It’s just like when e-commerce started. In a way, there was a rivalry, but in reality, everyone needed to be quite close. It’s always safety in numbers when it comes to innovation.
