24 Sèvres Marks One-Year Anniversary With Celebrity Style Tips
LESSONS IN STYLE: As it prepares to celebrate its first anniversary, online retailer 24 Sèvres is launching a new monthly feature that gives celebrity guest editors carte blanche to style four looks culled from items available on the site.
The feature launches on Friday with Leïla Bekhti, known for her roles in “A Prophet” and “All That Glitters.” The French actress pulled a selection of designer brands and contemporary labels, for instance, pairing an asymmetric skirt from Céline with Off-White boots, and a vintage-inspired Miu Miu jumpsuit with stilettos.
“Parisienne style, for me, is practical, it’s the anti-total look. We are all unique women, with our own style. That’s what we should develop, we shouldn’t be copying trends, we should be finding our own,” she said in a statement.
Eric Goguey, chief executive officer of 24 Sèvres, said the initiative was part of a move to put style advice at the center of the site, which is the global e-commerce arm of Paris department store Le Bon Marché. “We are trying to offer content that is much more anchored in real life,” he told WWD.
The architects of the site, owned and managed by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, originally identified an opening for fashion with a distinctly Parisian point of view that had been missing from digital and e-commerce. Through collaborations with artists and innovators, 24 Sèvres set out to apply a cultural twist to fashion.
It has since tweaked that approach, recently launching another new content section, Look du Jour, which invites friends of the brand, customers, models, as well as its own team members to showcase their personalities and individual styles. Each day, a new look is shared alongside tips for mixing and matching clothes.
“We’re going to try to treat art less directly. It will still be artistic, in terms of the places where we shoot, but that will take a backseat, perhaps, in order to put more emphasis on the woman and the style,” Goguey said.
The executive declined to share any figures on the first year of operations, beyond revealing that international sales account for a sizeable proportion of revenues at 24 Sèvres.
“Our first big surprise was how international the business is,” he said. “We knew that from a service standpoint, we had to be available in as many places as possible, which is why we now offer delivery to 80 countries. But we never imagined we would end up delivering in at least 40 to 50 countries worldwide each week.”
He credited social media with driving awareness of the site. “That is really the strength of online retail today, that you can set up a business and have customers in countries where you don’t even have direct marketing actions in place,” Goguey remarked.
Going forward, 24 Sèvres plans to offer more capsule collections, along the lines of its recent collaboration with London-based fashion brand Erdem. For the fall season, it will bring on board several more leading luxury brands, including Calvin Klein, Dries Van Noten and Bottega Veneta.
And on June 14, it will unveil a new jewelry section with around 10 brands, such as Monsieur Paris, selling items priced between 100 euros and 1,000 euros. To mark the launch, each brand has created exclusive pieces for 24 Sèvres.
Goguey said the retailer would soon add video, as it continues to improve its services in the face of growing competition from other pure players and a flood of Instagram brands. “It creates a healthy rivalry that at the end of the day is great news for the customer,” he concluded.
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