Alison Loehnis (Net-a-Porter) | Prestige Hong Kong (Jun 19)

alison loehnis, president of luxury e-tailers Net-A-Porter and Mr Porter, talks to zaneta cheng about the elusive analogue-digital balance and why it pays to put customers first

Competition, conflict or cannibalism has plagued the conversation around print and digital ever since the latter entered the picture. But for Alison Loehnis, president of global luxury e-tailers Net-A-Porter and Mr Porter, the multi-platform approach – a balance between digital and analogue – has been central to the brand’s success. It’s a key engine that keeps the platform serving the needs of its customers and one that ensures they come back again and again.

“Our customers have come to trust that we’re going to show them things that we know they’ll find interesting. But equally that’s where content comes in and is so important,” Loehnis tells me one soggy afternoon in Paris. “For us, content has never been about being an add-on. It’s been about bringing product to life for the customer. So if we’re telling you about a new designer, maybe you want to hear that Peter Do worked for Phoebe at Celine and maybe you want to know why his fabrications are like this.”

Born a shoppable e-magazine, Net-A-Porter understood the need to harness content alongside its retail business right from the beginning. Later on, this digital content expanded into print and became Porter magazine. Similarly Mr Porter, the group’s menswear e-retail arm, produces print content in the form of Mr P, a style-focused broadsheet.

“If you think about Mr Porter being so quintessentially British and this idea of the broadsheet, we loved the idea, for both of them, to get into print,” Loehnis says. “And it was counterintuitive, because people would say, well, you’re a pure play, and yes, we’re a pure play, but our customers are consuming content in different kinds of ways. They’re not solely on their phones and back then they weren’t solely on their laptops. They actually were going through magazines and newspapers, so our customers are actually multi-platform, and it was a wonderful way of expressing our brand.”

Loehnis’s enthusiasm for the multi-platform approach comes from its demonstrable success. When asked if she believes in print’s ability to exist alongside digital, her response is immediate – “Yes, absolutely.”

“We look to our customers every year to ask what products they’re interested in and what we could do better,” Loehnis says. “We did all this research and basically realised that everyone is consuming things in print and in digital.”

Not that she’s unaware of the changing landscape, however. “And for sure the equilibrium, the percentage of each that they’re consuming has evolved, but for sure they’re operating in a multi-platform way.”

That Net-A-Porter and Mr Porter have secured a successful working balance between digital and analogue is testament to Loehnis and the group’s ability to fill gaps in the market, something Loehnis attributes to a maniacal focus on customer first.

“Going back to 2009, there was this new phone and then these apps coming out. We thought, ‘How do we make things easier for you?’ And I think that, for me, the whole dialogue around how you sell online has changed, too, with the amazing growth of mobile,” she says. “But for me the notion of selling fashion online is that you’re making someone happy. So I like to think that because fashion should be playful and fun, you should also save people time and make it easier.”

Mobile now counts for roughly 70 percent of transactions in some of the group’s regions, with early adoption coming from Asia and the Middle East, where there’s no correlation between size of screen and size of basket.

“Is mobile the future? One hundred percent. I mean, what we’re seeing is the same way [it was with] the take-up of e-commerce and the take-up of desktop and then desktop to laptop, but it’s about following your customer and then anticipating where he or she will be and trying to stay a step ahead. And understanding which platforms and technologies are going to be most relevant.

“I think what sets us apart is this unflagging customer centricity and the notion that everything we do is for him or her. It might sound obvious but there’s lots of excitement around gizmos and gimmicks, and that’s never anything we could consider unless it’s genuinely going to make your life easier.”

Despite the continual success of mobile – in fact, Loehnis says that customers can easily buy a US$100,000 watch using their phone – the group has continued to maintain its focus on the analogue, fine-tuning it where customers can be better served.

“We have same-day delivery in Hong Kong, New York and London, and some of our drivers in London, which is the most mature of our same-day-delivery markets, will say, ‘You know, sometimes I drop stuff off at my clients’ houses and they want me to wait. I hope it’s OK.’” And I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness, of course it’s OK,’ and I was thrilled because it showed that everyone at every part of the organisation is thinking about the customer. So we created this thing called Wait & Return. And for the customer it’s wonderful, right? But again it’s just thinking, and this is a very analogue example, of how to make life easier for you.”

Thus, customer loyalty becomes a closed loop, thanks to the digital-print, digital-analogue configuration. “We find, perhaps unsurprisingly, those who read our content become our most engaged, so we follow a clear trajectory between reading and spending. I think it’s about bringing products to life across platforms. And if you think about the roots of Net-A-Porter, what we were, the idea is that we’re a fashion magazine that you can shop from and it’s connecting the dots.”