Amazon To Launch A New Luxury Fashion Site

Amazon is now a well-known, household name that is famous for its extensive apparel collection, but the luxury fashion sector is one that it hasn’t ventured into yet.

Two successful fashion acquisitions that the brand has made are of Zappos and Shopbop, meaning that it first tried out buying another fashion site before coming up with one.

Amazon has made no comments on the exact layout and working of the site, and whether or not it will be successful is definitely a major question mark.

Will renowned businesses be willing to collaborate with the brand and list their products on the website?

Amazon’s extensive reach, influence and popularity is undeniable, so major brands should be quite pumped for this new venture. However, there’s a catch.

After all purchases, Amazon keeps customer details within its database, and doesn’t give away much to the vendor. This can prove to be a major setback to luxury businesses, who may not be able to then contact customers to instigate repeat purchases and notify offers. Since the luxury industry highly relies on interacting with customers and maintaining consistent relations, the inability to access customer’s purchase histories and other details will reduce the efficiency of the brand. Brands that decide to sign up will become completely dependent on Amazon for promoting their products and reaching out to customers, and deciding to do it or not is then completely at Amazon’s discretion.

Traditionally, luxury brands have been spreading and circulating products by selling them through legacy stores. Store owners often try to control pricing, placement and other such variables, introduce other competing brands and also exercise complete control over access to customers. All of these put the brand and the store in conflict. Essentially, this prospective site by Amazon will act as a bigger, virtual legacy store, and will have pretty much the same kind of conflicts with the brands that sign up.

Counterfeiting can also prove to be one big issue, as the high margin in luxury goods is an open playground for counterfeiters to sweep in with very immaculate and realistic looking duplicates.

The bottom line: The potential success/failure of this prospective site simply depends on Amazon’s ability to rise up to this luxurious occasion, and create a community that can reflect and do justice to the legacy of the luxury fashion industry.

This is unlike any other product introduction the website has done; luxury is a whole different ball game, it should incorporate elements such as ingenuity, aesthetics, thoughtfulness and seamless curation. The result should be a beautiful haven where teenagers will want to buy prom dresses, a place where a bride will want to pick out her exquisite reception gown, a place that will be the top choice for an international businessman to pick out his Italian tuxedo.

If Amazon manages to pull off something that measures up to this, the world shall forever rejoice.

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