British Fashion Gets a Web Dynamo
“This month Natalie Massenet, the founder of Net-a-Porter and Internet guru to the fashion world, will throw her might behind London Fashion Week. As the newly appointed chairman of the British Fashion Council, she will use her power to promote designers not in their traditional role as funky and cool, but as major players in a global arena.”
As the newly appointed chairman of the British Fashion Council, she will use her power to promote designers not in their traditional role as funky and cool, but as major players in a global arena.
“I haven’t given up on my day job!” says Ms. Massenet, who is executive chairman of Net-a-Porter, explaining how she was persuaded to take up the role after working on a four-year business strategy with Caroline Rush, the chief executive of the British Fashion Council (BFC).
The pro bono appointment shows Ms. Massenet’s astonishing virtuosity. This month the executive, who built her online shopping empire over 13 years, will launch Net-a-Porter in French and German and in Mandarin, for the ever-growing number of Asian online shoppers, who now make up one third of Net-a-Porter’s clients.
Ms. Massenet, a pioneering force behind online luxury shopping will also unveil a newsstand version of the on-line magazine concept that has helped build the success of Net-a-Porter, because it invested in editorial content to attract more than five million monthly visitors to read, browse and shop the latest offerings.
This magazine maneuver takes Ms. Massenet back to her earliest days at the British magazine Tatler in the 1990s — before she built the e-tail business from a £880,000, or $1.4 million, start-up put together by her former husband, an investment banker. She then sold the brand in 2010 to the luxury group Richemont, which valued the company at £350 million, netting her a supposed £50 million.
Ms. Massenet, 47, sits on a couch in the glass box of an office that offers an aerial view of London. With the fitful sun shimmering through wisps of mist and on the space-age construction of the Westfield shopping complex, she is literally, as well as metaphorically with her online business, in the “cloud.”
She calls it “a cathedral-like feeling of light” and announces that the huge space is no longer enough: Westfield has promised to build a new rooftop wing by next year.
Ironically, the Net-a-Porter organization with its 2,500 global employees sits above a shopping mall that has bricks-and-mortar stores for luxury brands from Burberry to Prada to Louis Vuitton. Although Prada is one of the few brands that has resisted her blandishments. Ms. Massenet’s slim mouth, set in a perfect-oval-shaped face, puckers at such a refusal.
