Luxury E-commerce: Chanel Goes Online

French couture fashion brands are mainly strangers to the e-commerce scene. One brave endeavor, Chanel is making attempts at taking their products online. Certainly makeup and fragrance have been available online for a while through retailers, but only until recently, Chanel - one of the most prestigious fashion house - is taking a big step forward with fine jewelery.

For the first time ever, some of the Paris-based brand’s jewelry will be available online via high-end fashion retail site Net-a-Porter, it was announced late last week (April 10). Via The Telegraph, the limited-edition Coco Crush collection will only be available on Net-a-Porter for three weeks beginning April 15. Coco Crush is a six-piece collection consisting of five rings and one cuff, available in 18-carat white and yellow gold. The price of the jewelry will range from $2,049 to $19,762.

Note that the capsule collection is only available online for a limited 3 week time. The sense of exclusivity will drive even more hype and drive more fans to buy them. I find the target audience rather interesting when Chanel chose to partner with Net-a-Porter: they are the fashion forward, modern 30-45 affluent and highly connected people, based on Net-a-Porter's own media kit.

Chanel is eyeing this market but needs a channel. Instead of building their own jewelry e-commerce site, they tested water with this pop-up shop within Net-a-Porter. It is a safe bet with measurable KPIs: website traffic, order volume, social media traction, etc. 

I admire the steps Chanel is taking towards e-commerce, because for a brand that has been standing behind a long history and the legendary Coco Chanel, you can never be too cautious when expanding your presence online, which is increasingly becoming more of a necessity than a nice-to-have.