While the ecommerce wars are escalating, The Outnet, part of The Net-A-Porter Group, has carved itself a niche in the discount, luxury fashion space. While the two concepts might seem mutually exclusive, The Outnet director of global sales and marketing Andres Sosa told the audience at the ADMA Global Forum conference that the business set out to build a brand to disrupt luxury shopping.
“We redefined the discount model – a bold statement I know,” Sosa said.
“At the beginning discounted fashion online was a bit of a dirty world – it was all about flash sales, second hand goods and poor service. When we launched we decided that we were going to change this.”
Instead of the typical discount experience Sosa's team decided to focus on customer experience to “offer the customer an experience that she had never been offered before when it came to discounted previous season goods.”
It also built on what it called the “editorial heart” of The Net-A-Porter Group. Group founder Natalie Massenet had a background in fashion magazines and built Net-A-Porter – the group's flagship business – on the belief that there was a need for customers o be able to buy the stories they were reading in magazines.
“We decided from the start that we would not be a flash sale site. It was going to be about content and editorial, something that runs through the DNA of everything that we do at the Net-A-Porter Group,” Sosa said.
“For us content is less about trends and more about occasion – we know our customer really shopped through occasion. So for us, our content is all about helping her through that journey with the product we have on the site.”
“We see content as everything – not just editorial but the way we shoot the product pages, the way we style so there is a whole area of the business that is looking into content.”
Content also means engagement. Sosa pointed to a campaign The Outnet ran with Victoria Beckham to launch her fashion sale for charity organisation Mothers2Mothers which saw the former pop star sell hundreds of her own designer items.
It built a PR driven campaign with staggered content and access to the site to raise the equivalent of £26 million in PR editorial, and reaching one billion people.
Another of Sosa's examples was its hijacking of London Fashion Week with its Sergio the Shoe Hunter campaign, which saw a dog with a GoPro collar capture content to be shown of social media.
Despite having a limited budget, the campaign created 25 million impressions.
Part of the way it is able to pique interest is because The Outnet has built profiles of who its customers were in order to be able understand how to target them. It came away with five key segments but decided to focus on two of them that represented roughly half of its customer base; named 'The Affluent Curator” and 'The Budget Fashionista.'
“At the start we through our customer was someone who couldn't afford to buy luxury goods at full price, and she was going to be young,” Sosa said.
“And we were so wrong, and we realised that very quickly. Our customer is a savvy woman – she buys current but she also buys previous season.”
Sosa said that profile impact the way The Outnet looks to target customers.
“We don't want her to compromise of experience just because we are offering her previous season,” Sosa said. “So it's the whole package, and that includes of course fantastic edited products form great brands at great prices.”
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