What's luxury to you? Is it a couture Chanel gown? A shiny car with a roaring engine?
Perhaps, it's a night of organic wine, artisanal pizza, and a bottomless well of on-demand British sitcoms. However specific you want to get, we always define luxury as exquisite, effortless, and tailored to you.
But a decade or so ago, few of those qualities applied to the online experience — it was clunky, complicated, cluttered, and about as personalized as an insurance form.
Now, though, the best e-commerce sites are graceful, digital boutiques, with beautiful photography, custom-curated shopping lists, and style direction from esteemed print editors. The finer vacation booking platforms look like glossy travel magazines, and your favorite fashion blogs are seamlessly shoppable (hi, there). Even the very nature of a photography is changing to match this new landscape (more on that later).
What we have now is an inspiring, pixelated marketplace that's not only transformed how we shop, but the very DNA of the storied luxury brands within it, as well.
What happened? Well, a clutch of driven, digital architects saw and capitalized on opportunities that even some of the top technologists and Fortune 500 companies didn't.
They looked at the online packaging, marketing, and selling of luxury and saw how it could be as custom-tailored as any couture product. Programmers, artists, entrepreneurs, and editors, these are the people logged on and changing the game.
11. Carter Cleveland, the founder of Artsy, is making the world's top art galleries more accessible.
Under the right brush, a few dollars of oil-based paint on a cotton canvas can become a cherished masterpiece worth millions — the greatest luxury of all. Yet, the real-art market has traditionally only existed in a handful of cities. Created in his Princeton dorm room, Carter Cleveland's Artsy is upending that. With the help of the best galleries in the world, Cleveland is building what could be the art market's new global center for buyers and for folks who just want to look.
Paint By Numbers: "Artsy isn't about the art first and the science second. It's about the two of them coming together equally. In addition to being an art company, we're a hardcore technology and design company. We bring the two together on equal footing — that's where we think the magic happens."
Image Search: "So many people out there buy nice clothes, apartments, and cars, but they put mass-produced posters and prints on their walls simply because they don't have access to the world's top galleries. For instance, over 50% of the entire U.S. art market goes through Manhattan. By making the art world accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, there's an opportunity to massively expand the market and make fine art something that is one day as popular and ubiquitous as music and film."
Public Gallery: "If you go onto Artsy, you can see what is currently hanging on the walls of the top galleries in New York, London, Paris, Shanghai, the list goes on. In five years, we hope to be the main sales channel for art galleries in the same way that Yelp helps restaurants receive clients. Now, we'd be very happy if only 1% of our user base buys art — that would make the experience of seeing the world's art, and learning about the world's art, free for the other 99%. It's a public service and a luxury business."
10. Taylor Tomasi Hill, the artistic director at Moda Operandi, left Marie Claire for e-commerce.
When the crimson-haired street-style star Taylor Tomasi Hill left her plum print-publishing position as accessories director at Marie Claire for Moda Operandi — Vogue editor Lauren Santo Domingo and former Gilt Groupe exec Aslaug Magnusdottir's ultra-luxe online retailer — the industry took notice.
With one of fashion's favorite young, rising editors poached by e-commerce, we began to wonder if the future of glossy, high-end content was shoppable. We're not wondering anymore.
Attention, Shoppers: “Moda Operandi launched at a time when online retail was dominated by discount shopping. But the thing was, consumers were increasingly comfortable with shopping online for unique, limited, or luxury products. Because we all follow designers and street-style images online, shoppers are much savvier about how they define luxury and what pieces they want to buy.
The Internet transformed fashion shows from exclusive trade events to global consumer events. Still, the full-priced consumer was largely being ignored. We leveraged all that Fashion Week excitement by giving women access to the pieces they already loved, that might not be at brick-and-mortar luxury retailers.”
Broadband Connection: “One of the best things about technology is the potential for wide outreach. We recently collaborated with goop, which focuses on an impressive range of topics for women — a great opportunity to extend far beyond fashion.
Even when I conceptualize and style editorial stories for Moda Operandi, we’re helping our customers imagine new ways to wear our products.”
Learning Curves: “Even though I work at an online company, I’m not the most tech-friendly individual. I carry a BlackBerry for emails and texts, and an iPhone for everything else (especially Instagram!). I was told recently that I have good Instagram etiquette, which was huge!
When I first started Instagramming, I did really offensive things like use Kelvin with the border. I should also probably add learning Excel to my to-do list!”
9. Ruzwana Bashir's startup Peek makes booking your next vacation feel as easy as reading a fashion magazine.
Planning an eventful, enriching vacation can be maddening, even for a Fulbright scholar, Oxford educated, Harvard MBA, Goldman Sachs, Art.sy, and Gilt Groupe-trained marvel like Ruzwana Bashir.
But her frustration with booking an escape became the inspiration behind Peek. Stocked with rich, tailored itineraries, lush photography, and tastemaker travelogues, the soup-to-nuts luxury booking website replaces your travel agent and your glossy travel mags at once. Seemless, indeed.
Tech Crush: "I fell in love with the idea of building a business at a really young age. I craved the opportunity to build a business from scratch. At Gilt Groupe, I realized just how transformative technology could be in creating wonderful user experiences and rethinking traditional business models. I was hooked!"
My Moment: “The inspiration for Peek came from a special birthday trip to Istanbul. I spent 20 hours searching through guidebooks, asking friends, and browsing the web for the best things to do there.
Then, I ended up having to call far-flung companies to book all the experiences I'd discovered. It was so lengthy and frustrating, I wished there was a one-stop shop to book amazing activities online. It didn't exist. So, I created it!”
Peek Perfection: "We focus on storytelling through beautiful photography and captivating editorial, so our users can imagine themselves embarking on the activity they’re learning about.
We plan a whole trip and discover a city’s hidden gems through a diverse group of tastemakers — Diane von Fürstenberg, Tory Burch, Wolfgang Puck, Steve Aoki, and French Laundry’s Tim Hollingsworth. At its heart, Peek is about being able to tell stories that people can connect with."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider