Phreshly Squeezed

Up until now, the idea of purchasing high fashion goods via the brands’ websites was unheard of (with few exceptions; Louis Vuitton has been selling its accessories online since the LVMH owned eluxury.com went down in 2008). The idea of e-commerce mostly catered to affordable brands in the 90s, with high-end brands joining in on the trend in the new millennium; however most luxury brands were unfazed by such. The ideal luxury fashion website relied upon extravagant photographs in the background of a flash interface. As we can see, on a side note, the whole revolution of search engine optimization has yet to hit the high fashion markets, as many have opted to abandon flash in lieu for coding that is more readily crawled by Google. But of course, these websites still garner the hits because of the age of the domain, backlinks, trackbacks, and other factors. But finally, brands, such as Marc Jacobs, La Perla, and Hugo Boss, are opting to making their goods available online.

Why only now, though? Well, you can give some thanks to the recession, which has triggered the long needed movement towards e-commerce for high-fashion lines. With department stores slashing prices in half in attempts to collect some profits, fashion brands are recognizing their need to take control of their pieces. And quite frankly, it is about time, especially given that profits in the luxury-goods industry fell approximately 8% in 2009 without the aid of e-commerce. And while there won’t be friendly chatter to convince you which bag is best for your needs or advice on your true bra size, there is at least the option to shop at your convenience, as opposed to having to trek to the boutique.

One could also go so far as to say that the Louis Vuitton lawsuit against Google may have been a factor in moving luxury brands to the web. For those that may not have recalled the incident, Louis Vuitton was not to happy with the fact that upon searching the brand on Google, many websites for counterfeit products came up in the advertisement links. Not to mention, results for buying counterfeit bags in the actual search engine results comes up third and thereafter. So perhaps some of the move towards providing a sense of e-commerce is to steer consumers away from the prevalence of the counterfeit links and more towards purchasing power of owning a luxury item from the brand itself.

In any case, it’s about time.

Image courtesy of NYMag.com via Prada

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