This week, an inside look at the struggles and next steps of the sustainable luxury fashion e-tailer Maison de Mode. Plus, the Apple Watch gets the Hermès treatment.
Maison de Mode is the latest luxury e-commerce company seeking a buyer.
The 9-year-old company, owned by fashion-tech investor Carmen Busquets, Hearst Corporation heiress Amanda Hearst and Hassan Pierre, has largely been at a standstill since the start of the year, when it unloaded its small staff, Pierre told Glossy this week. Now, its owners are looking for a buyer who can fund the vast content and marketing needed to compete in today’s market.
“For the brand to grow to where it should be is going to take heavy cash flow,” Pierre said. “We decided it would be best to have someone else come in and for us to hand the reins off and step back from the business.”
Leveraging a marketplace model, Maison de Mode sells products by luxury brands focused on sustainability. Over the years, they’ve included Silvia Tcherassi, Amour Vert and O2 Monde, the latter a vegan shoe company founded by Bottega Veneta alum Mirco Scoccia. Out of the gate, the Maison de Mode business also housed a consulting and communications arm dubbed Mode Communications, which it has since “fizzled,” Pierre said. And, since 2023, it’s been the exclusive sustainable fashion partner of Hearst’s e-commerce marketplace The Tower, currently in beta. As The Tower comes to life this year, Maison de Mode’s products will have an expanded presence, selling beyond their current setup on Harper’s Bazaar’s ShopBazaar — the platform currently drives 30% of Maison de Mode’s business.
In late March, Glossy reached out to Pierre to inquire about the state of Maison de Mode, as its homepage was still messaging winter wear, its Instagram bio was linking to a holiday wishlist and it had not posted on social media in weeks. In an email, Pierre said, “We are just gearing up for a new website update and launch of new products for spring.” Instagram posts began to roll out weekly, but, until early this week, the website’s homepage and new arrivals, most of which were sold out, remained unchanged since March at the latest.
“We kept it up and running because people were shopping,” Pierre said, explaining that customers continued to buy “evergreen” styles like Lacoste polos. “We didn’t have to do anything to keep it going.” But also, it didn’t have the funds to do anything more.
Early this week, Maison de Mode wiped its website and Instagram clean. The former now states “Maison de Mode Coming Soon,” incorporating a new brand logo. The latter features 15 posts showing four iterations of the logo on a contrasting-colored background. AI was used to create the logo, which leverages both serif and sans serif fonts to point to the company’s conflicted relationship with traditional luxury, according to a brand statement. The color-heavy approach was chosen as a means to stand out among black-and-white-branded competitors including Net-a-Porter, Ssense and FWRD. The use of AI is also being explored for product descriptions.
“It’s Maison de Mode 2.0,” Pierre said of the rebrand, which is expected to be reflected in a shoppable site by spring. “We decided that, before entering anything new with anybody, we wanted to see what we could do, from a business standpoint, in terms of revamping and re-energizing the business.” The update is also meant to attract new brand partners, as The Tower’s expansion will equate to new demands on Maison de Mode. Brands that can ship products within 48 hours are a target, with many existing partners being “very niche brands that can take weeks” to ship, Pierre said.
Those small existing partners will lose Maison de Mode as a sales channel, which should not have a large effect on their business, Pierre said. He reasoned that, rather than constantly selling the same brands, Maison de Mode had “a rolling matrix of brands” that was updated every three months. What’s more, because Maison de Mode operates on a dropship model, no orders will need to be canceled.
Regardless of the motivation, shifting to a focus on bigger brands is a smart business move, said Scott Kerr, founder and president of Silvertone luxury branding consultancy. “Consumers are interested in sustainability, but they’re more interested in the power of the brand,” he said “It’s nice to sell indie brands that are doing great for the world, in terms of sustainability, but I don’t know if that can scale. … I don’t see that as a viable business.”
The decision to sell comes as Busquets, an investor in digital-powered fashion companies including Farfetch and Lyst and the largest private shareholder of Net-a-Porter, is exiting many of her investments, Pierre said. Busquets became a partner in Maison de Mode in 2018, after leading a seed funding round of $600,000.
According to Pierre, Maison de Mode was approached by a potential buyer within the last year which prompted the company to shop around, expanding the pool of interested parties. Piquing their interest is the company’s life-long profitability, its partnership with The Tower offering scalability and its brand recognition, Pierre said. Maison de Mode has 70,000 Instagram followers and — despite the site’s stagnant state — 38% of customers were visiting daily through June, he said.
Maison de Mode’s sustainability focus is also a draw, Pierre said, noting that the company saw monthly sales growth of more than 160% at the height of the pandemic, from March 2020 to April 2020.
“But every brand’s a sustainable brand now,” he admitted. He pointed out Prada’s ongoing investment in its recycled Re-Nylon collection and Dolce & Gabbana’s recent focus on archival fashions.
Indeed, as consumers have increasingly demanded ethical practices from the brands they support, Maison de Mode’s placement in the luxury landscape has become less distinct. Net-a-Porter launched the Net Sustain shopping vertical focused on sustainably-made luxury fashions in 2019. And retailers from MyTheresa to Neiman Marcus have launched luxury resale, expanding their own sustainability plays.
Still, according to Pierre, “Investment and acquisition aren’t that hard right now.”
“There are a lot of people with tons of extra cash flow, and when you have shiny names and fashion attached to any business, you can get a lot of individuals who want to be involved,” he said. “Finding the right partner is the hard part.”
Kerr painted a different picture. “Everybody’s running away from luxury e-commerce,” he said. “It’s just the state of the consumer. All these multi-brand fashion marketplaces did well during the pandemic because everybody was sitting around [shopping online] and people thought nobody would be going back to stores. Slowly but surely, the experience economy surfaced.”
Seemingly with one foot out the door, Maison de Mode’s founders are dangling big growth possibilities to potential buyers. According to a press release about the company’s rebrand, released on Wednesday, Maison de Mode will soon release menswear and home decor categories, and, by 2029, it will form a tech hub designed to nurture tech talent.
“We built what we wanted to build,” Pierre told Glossy. “We wanted to make sustainable fashion a part of the lexicon and the forefront of fashion, and we did that.”
According to Pierre, the biggest challenge facing multi-brand retailers today is customers’ loyalty to brands. “The brands themselves have done such a good job keeping the customer loyal, it’s hard for [luxury] retailers to keep that customer engaged,” he said, adding, “There aren’t that many of us anymore.”
Kerr echoed the sentiment: “The top luxury brands are all investing in their mono-brand stores — that’s outpacing their investments in retail partners. They’re focused on telling the story the way they want to, owning the customer, owning the experience and curating products the way they want them sold. …. And that’s not going away.”
The retailers winning in the space are those with a winning “buy,” or product curation, Pierre said. As an example, he pointed to MyTheresa, which last week reported a 10% year-over-year sales increase to $927 million for its fiscal 2024, which wrapped in June. As Maison de Mode’s chief brand officer, Hearst selects the featured products while prioritizing exclusivity, Pierre said. Kerr noted that, in addition, MyTheresa has strong brand relationships and compelling content and “goes offline,” regularly hosting community events.
Most of the luxury industry is on unstable ground following a period of great growth, and the state of the e-commerce market tells the story well. Longtime authority Farfetch narrowly survived collapse in 2023, and Matches Fashion and Dora Maar are among luxury e-tailers that have shuttered this year.
Notes from the week
On Tuesday, the European Cultural and Creative Industries Alliance rolled out the European Luxury Manifesto, outlining the necessary EU policy changes that will enable the sector to continue to thrive.
In a customer email on Tuesday, Hermès introduced the latest products that are part of its Apple partnership, including the first Apple Watch Hermès Ultra.
Thom Bettridge, formerly Ssense vp of creative content, was named editor-in-chief and chief brand officer of i-D Magazine.
Pharrell’s Joopiter is auctioning off a stay at NOT A HOTEL TOKYO, an exclusive destination creative directed by Nigo.
Daniel Lee’s spring 2025 collection for Burberry, introduced during London Fashion Week on Monday, received mixed reviews.
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