by Against a challenging landscape for department stores and fashion e-commerce giants, two new apps aimed at making personal luxury shopping easier took off during Paris Fashion Week on Sunday.
First up, Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez gathered Sarah Andelman, Alexis Mabille, Rickie de Sole, Tina Leung and more to celebrate The Floorr.
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Co-founded by Net-a-porter vets Lupe Puerta and investor Carmen Busquets, The Floorr is the world’s first engine for personal shopping entrepreneurs to better serve the industry and end customers.
“When big businesses like Farfetch and Matches fail, that leaves a lot of clients, and it’s a great opportunity. …Luxury is a loyal client,” said Busquets.
“And it leaves out a lot of personal shoppers,” said Puerta, who was behind Net-a-porter’s One Over Loyalty program, adding that personal shoppers and stylists drive up to 15 percent of luxury goods sales. .
She created the software and platform to leverage that, onboard retailers including Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Saks, Browns, SSense, Net-a-porter, Matches, Chloé and Ferragamo, so that her All inventory displayed in one place. The app allows personal shoppers to have their own profiles and streamline their process, drawing from a wide selection and communicating with customers through in-app chats, mood boards, looks and more.
The idea is that “personal shoppers are becoming brokers in fashion,” Puerta said. “They have a place where they can earn money from anywhere in the world. We’re allowing them to work in a very agile way so they don’t have to be sourcing all the time, they don’t have to be creating PDFs and DMing all the time.”
The Floorr platform has about 200 personal shoppers who can generate between $1 million and $4 million in net worth per year, she said, and may have between 10 and 100 customers. Hollywood stylists and Hermès sourcing experts are among its ranks in the app.
“People look at Hollywood stylists and they want to work on dressing people for the red carpet, but even those who work with celebrities realize there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for them, and we’re that platform where they can manage everyone. but they don’t have a big project with it,” she said.
The Floorr is an intermediary, and does not handle inventory, sales or shipping; that’s up to the personal shoppers. But when there is a sale, The Floorr takes a small commission (8 to 20 percent) that varies from brand to brand.
“A large number of personal shoppers are now working independently. And we’re not just looking at them, we’re looking at the entire workforce on the shop floor, which is one of the largest workforces in the world. We want them to have a tool in their hands, whether they’re on the shop floor or online, so the moment a customer is in front of them, they can access our global inventory feed and close the sale and still get. the commission.”
Certainly, shoppers could benefit from smoother customer service, or in some cases, no customer service, as well.
“I remember many years ago… my father said that people will pay a fortune for a service and the service will be the thing that will be needed the most,” said Busquets. “It’s getting that way.”
Meanwhile, at Café Lapérouse, Ashley Graham, Brooks Nader, Alejandra Rojas, Jonathan Simkhai and others gathered to celebrate the launch of Vêtir, the smart AI-powered shopping app, digital closet and styling platform created by a vet Kate Davidson Hudson industries.
After gaining experience working with VICs, or very important customers, at LuisaViaRoma, Davidson Hudson started developing the app two years ago to create a way for clients and their personal stylists to shop without the limits of geography or physical touch points.
“We have a lot of VICs, especially in the US, shopping across different e-commerce platforms … and that model is being rethought before our eyes. … for example, who are the VICs turning to. Then there are your favorite in-store partners. So Vêtir is really based on the idea of synchronizing everything in one interface,” she said.
Vêtir allows users to upload the contents of their closets to the app (all four of Tom Brady’s closets are currently being uploaded, Davidson Hudson said, noting that they created software that silhouettes items to make them more attractions.) Then they can invite their favorite stylists and store Associates to send personalized shopping recommendations and outfits, even add them to a personal calendar or packing list.
“We have a lot of celebrity stylists like Erin Walsh who, when Anne Hathaway is on a press junket, will put an outfit in at 9 am, noon, 3 pm and it shows up in her calendar as a link. You open the link and it opens right to the suit page on the app. With some of our VICs having multiple houses or having a house manager, that’s a useful tool in terms of packing lists. Or they can scroll through their various closets and everything is aggregated and categorized there. The huge interface is a huge data play, because behind the scenes, the AI is actually learning your personal preferences and shopping habits,” she explained.
A custom algorithm is created for each user. “It means if someone is chatting with their stylist in the app and they say, ‘I don’t really like my arms, please don’t send me anything shorter than a short sleeve,’ AI tracks that prompts and he will never show you anything that is sleeveless.”
The app has three carousel feeds, one with a human touch, a stylist who will add suggestions and notes like “this new Gucci top would go great with that vintage Gucci cardigan in your closet for your ultimate trip this week.” The second carousel is an AI feed that pulls in entries from brand partners based on your preferences. The final feed is a new general feed that comes in.
Vêtir is also inviting key personal sources to keep a sense of, for example, Alaïa’s must-have apartments.
The app operates on a marketplace model, with various retail partners pitching in behind it. Net-a-porter is the exclusive multi-brand partner for the first year, and coin brands Altuzarra, Gabriela Hearst and others are linked through their Shopify accounts. There is a universal shopping cart “that was really important for us to build. Instead of sending you to another site, we wanted to control the experience. And it aggregates all your order data in one place and uploads it to your closet with meta tags,” she said.
Vêtir is also licensing its technology package to e-retailers to offer to personal shoppers, who can access real-time analytics, and use the interface to service one or their clients to all at one time. And the e-tailer owns that data, even if the personal shopper leaves.
The app is free for users but there is currently a gate, and stylists must have a minimum book size of $2 million to qualify to be on the platform. There is currently a waiting list of 79 stylists to join, she said, comparing the app to “Uber for stylists”.
Vêtir is also beta-testing a patented technology for salable videos that allows stylists in their atelier or shop, to take videos with a time stamp and an embedded link, so a client can purchase in-app. “It’s a way for them to expand their business beyond their time zone and physical constraints,” she said.
The goal is to sign the best luxury, prestige and jewelry brands, and one day open up the app to high-net-worth clients who don’t work with personal stylists.
This is the next generation of the box style model, Davidson Hudson emphasized. “We don’t touch inventory, and that’s the problem with a lot of what we’re seeing in the market now — the returns issues with Farfetch and YNAP and Matches. With the coin brands becoming so strong, we are there to service them and connect the dots to their VICs.”
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