E-Luxury

The race to enter the online sales arena is sending luxury watch brands to tipping point.

- Sean Mossadeg

DECKED IN A SUIT WITH FINE GLOVES matching the brand they’re selling, retail staff at watch boutiques have, for a long time now, been the most intimate faces of the brand that a consumer meets. Forget your CEOs, forget the marketing done on billboards. If the salesperson in front of you isn’t The One, the buying experience quickly goes out the door.

But like all sales conducted across the world now, the middleman is now merely a choice for the consumer to make. The online retail scene has slowly crept up on luxury watches and brands are making conscious decisions to build their online portals.

A decade ago, the idea that most luxury brands would partake in e-commerce would have been scoffed at. After all, luxury entailed a certain experience – be it sipping champagne while a salesperson tells you how good something looks on the wrist or a tour around the maison’s collection. That experience, however, is slowly making way for the consumer that cares more for ease of purchase than the traditional luxury service trappings.

Towards the end of last year, the push for online retail in the luxury watch world took a big step forward. In November, IWC Schaffhausen started retailing its timepieces on both Mr Porter and Net-a-Porter, joining brands like Zenith, Bremont and even high-end independent watchmaker, Ressence, that were already retailing on the sites.

However, the inclusion of a Richemont-owned brand is an important distinction. Mr Porter and Net-a-Porter come under the Yoox Net-A-Porter (YNAP) Group, of which Richemont is an investor in. One can only imagine that if IWC’s sales were to start moving on the uptick (without cannibalisation of physical retail), many of the brands in Richemont’s stables may soon adopt the YNAP programme.