NET-A-PORTER’s Mobile Push

Even though the high-profile events of the fashion world take place on a runway with exclusive crowds, NET-A-PORTER is showing that success in modern retail fashion depends on giving customers what they want and when they want it.

Digiday explained how NET-A-PORTER is readying a new content strategy aimed at tailoring a traditional print campaign for modern digital consumers. Tess Macleod-Smith, vice president of publishing at NET-A-PORTER Group, outlined the brand’s new mobile app, a free download wherein users can purchase subscriptions for access to six annual content updates — as if consumers had a high-gloss fashion magazine right in their hands. Macleod-Smith explained that this mixture of digital mobility and throwback sensitivities is the perfect blend for NET-A-PORTER’s eclectic consumer base.

“Our reader still loves print; there’s an authority in that, but she’s also on the go,” Macleod-Smith told Digiday. “On average, she is traveling 11 times a year, so we needed the mobile app.”

The decision to push forward on the mobile front may very well have been an economically guided one, too. NET-A-PORTER’s mobile sales have increased to comprise 40 percent of all transactions, and ignoring clear consumer demand for digital interactions with the NET-A-PORTER brand would have been a monumental misstep.

A primary goal of the app, Macleod-Smith explained, would be its ability to learn how to tailor content to each user’s interests. The logic follows that if consumers read about more things that they want to, they’ll be quicker to buy the items they’ve had their eye on.

“We’re a technology company,” Macleod-Smith told Digiday. “Our plan is to enhance our data and expertise and close that gap of impulsivity.”

A fashion brand with data at its heart will never be a bad combination, as long as consumers have equal appetites for clothes and clicks, and NET-A-PORTER’s mobile strategy seems set to play on that dynamic to even greater success.