HyeRi Jung/ Professor Monje/ CMN 622/ March 30, 2008/ Short Online Review #5
d. A critical analysis of a new media company – look into the listing of new media companies that have started in thelast15 years and provide a short study of its rise or demise.
I’m a frequent visitor of NET-A-PORTER. Even though I don’t buy anything, I like just browsing and reading its site. NET-A-PORTER is the world’s premier luxury fashion e-tailer. NET-A-PORTER, presented in the style of a fashion magazine, offers unprecedented access to the world’s cutting edge fashion designers that fill the pages of the leading international fashion publications delivered to worldwide customers’ door by worldwide express delivery. Launched in June 2000, NET-A-PORTER sells current season clothing, shoes, bags, and accessories, expertly selected by its editors for the fashion consumer worldwide. The fashion on the site represents the best looks from the trendiest labels from London, Paris, Milan, New York and Los Angeles. The line-up includes Miu Miu, Chloé, Jimmy Choo, Bottega Veneta, Fendi and Marc Jacobs and many more. NET-A-PORTER’s unique website combines the visual and authoritative impact of a magazine with the shopping simplicity of a catalogue. The virtual pages feature slick and original fashion content, photographs and features showcasing the latest collections all of which are available for purchase on the site. Contributors include trend forecasters, opinion makers, and journalists formerly from high fashion magazines like Vogue, Tatler, Elle, and W. NET-A-PORTER simultaneously educates and inspires fashion lovers on the latest fashion trends and enables them to buy real fashions. Luxury packaging replaces the luxury shop experience and customer care focuses on exceeding expectations. NET-A-PORTER is the first, the most popular, famous, and luxury fashion website to target a global market, understanding that the same brands are in demand internationally. To meet this demand, NET-A-PORTER offers customers a seamless, international shipping formula that allows deliveries to be made with taxes and duties pre-paid, expediting their valuable packages through international customs. So no matter where we live in the world, NET-A-PORTER is our local fashion shop. With the combination of NET-A-PORTER’s unique traits – the authoritative fashion editorial, a highly aesthetic and easy to use website, access to the world’s hardest to find international labels, customer care that exceeds expectations, and a sophisticated international shipping system – NET-A-PORTER leads the online fashion pack as the world’s most successful luxury global boutique and e-commerce destination. Company Background: In the summer of 2000, as many online retailers were closing up shop, London-based “net-a-porter.com” launched a site selling current season, full-priced high fashion. Founded by one of the leading magazine fashion editors, the company carved out a unique niche by connecting high-end customers with products that were often hard to find, including attire featured in runway shows and on the pages of top fashion magazines. Over the last six years, NET-A-PORTER (a play on the French phrase meaning “ready-to-wear”) has become a major destination site for discerning fashion aficionados around the world and has doubled its revenues every year to more than $ 40 million in 2005. Goals and Challenges: “our founder saw the site as a place to write about amazing fashions and make them available for purchase,” according to Martin Bartle, Heard of Marketing at NET-A-PORTER. “We sell over 120 of the world’s leading designers and ship to more than 90 countries around the world.” As a global business, NET-A-PORTER needed a powerful tool to create, send and track its online promotions. Unfortunately, the proprietary system that the company had developed simply wasn’t able to keep up with the volume of customers or with the complexity of the company’s online campaigns. Bartle says that the company had three types of emails that were sent to customers. “The first was a generic weekly e-mail to our entire customer base, which was effectively a magazine letting them know what was available. We also sent updates highlighting particular designers. Anyone who had bought from that designer before or had signed up for updates from that designer would get those. The third set of emails was comprised of product updates that were sent to customers who had requested information on certain items. “What happened over time was that our most loyal customers were getting an ever-increasing amount of email from us, and a single individual might get nine or ten emails a week. We wanted to reduce that to one. It’s a fairly simple-sounding problem, but it is quite a challenge to make that a reality when there are hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds of products being introduced each week.” The Solution: the company turned to Lyris ListManager to streamline its outbound email marketing. “A fairly simple problem required a very complex solution,” Bartle says. “Most of the competitors to Lyris that offer similar levels of functionality are ASP solutions, and we wanted an installed solution so that we could have full control and the flexibility to adapt it ourselves. We are a unique business, and we didn’t want a generic solution – we wanted something that we could modify to meet the specific needs of the company. NET-A-PORTER does a lot of online advertising, and we recently launched an affiliate program, but email is the largest driver of sales for us of any sales channel we have. Being able to manage the data and ensure that our customers are getting the right information is absolutely critical for us.” Because NET-A-PORTER specializes in the latest designs, it is important for the company to be “up-to-the-minute” in its communications with its loyal customers. After all, if Charlize Theron wears a Dior gown at a Sunday-night awards show, fashion aficionados want to know how to order the item immediately. In order to speed up communications with its user base, the company uses Lyris ListManager to notify customers immediately when new products become available, giving them first call on must-have items. Results and Future Plans: according to Bartle, the switch is already paying dividends. “We have a fairly blanket uplift that we have seen as a result of using Lyris ListManager. The click-through rates have gone up after combining our email channels, which was the most significant thing for us in terms of solving the problem that we had. Clearly Lyris was head and shoulders above most of the competitors in terms of solving the specific problem that we had. “But actually, it’s many of the other functions that Lyris offered that also helped us make the choice. In looking at the closed-loop marketing that we were able to do with a system like Lyris, we have much more under our control than we would with an ASP solution. That’s what drove us to Lyris and helped usmake our final choice. It has also allowed us to tie emails to triggered events; for example, ‘x-number of days after you’ve made a purchase you will receive this email,’ or ‘three weeks after someone first registers, he or she gets that email.’ We need this kind of flexibility and Lyris has made it possible.”
Additional Information: Lyris Technologies, founded in 1994, provides advanced software and services for email marketing and email delivery. Lyris’ solutions are available as software or as hosted applications and are used by more than 5,000 customers worldwide, from Fortune 500 corporations to fast-growing startups.
Works Cited: “Net-A-Porter.com: How An Online Fashion Retailer Used Lyris ListManager To Consolidate Its Online Promotions.” 29 March, 2008. <http://www.lyris.com/resources/casestudies/casestudy_net-a-porter.pdf>.
You can visit NET-A-PORTER at www.net-a-porter.com
