Luxury 2.0. - Can e-commerce become a competitive advantage for fashion luxury brands?

Real or virtual? Boundaries blur nowadays. It is all about images, sharing and being connected. Digitization is everywhere –but the exception proves the rule. Luxury is often associated with creativity, innovation and power. The industry has followed strong expansion policies, opening a significant number of stores in emerging countries during the last years. However, this is quite paradoxical when considering the e-commerce opportunities. These brands are currently facing challenges regarding the increasing competition. And one may wonder if luxury is still keeping with the times … The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to define whether e-commerce can become a competitive advantage for fashion luxury brands. As a first step, one must consider if these brands should rely on the online channel to sell their products. This first sub-question aims to analyze the strategic environment and capability of fashion luxury brands with a view to answer the second sub-question and provide consistent and creative recommendations. The document is composed of two parts. On the one hand, the literature review allows to discover the worlds of luxury, fashion and e-commerce. On the other hand, the research and analysis rely on qualitative assessment and evidence. The qualitative research involves the observation and comparison of diverse documents, including consulting report, databases, questionnaires, official website of brands and recent articles in the specialized press. In-depth analyses of an extensive number of sources enable to achieve the objectives previously mentioned and come up with the following findings. While fashion luxury brands have embraced the digital opportunity in terms of marketing, most of them still struggle to engage in online selling. Yet e-commerce proves to be interesting to target the current market, and especially future generations. Bricks-and-mortar players often encounter difficulties to adopt e-commerce and make it profitable. The omnichannel solution is a comprehensive model which seamlessly integrates the offline and online channels. It provides an enhanced experience to customers and create synergies for the organization. The competitive advantage of fashion luxury brands will lie in their ability to empower their talents when adopting the omnichannel rather than in the model itself, since the omnichannel solution will become the rule to play in retail in the next years.