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Running A Luxury Flash-Sale Site in China: Interview with Glamour Sales CEO Thibault Villet

Editor’s Note: The Interview is done for TechNode by Timothy Coghlan, an expert on the fashion industry in China and writes about the China fashion business in his blog maosuit

A seasoned veteran of luxury brand retail in Asia, Thibault Villet held senior positions at both L’Oreal and Coach before launching Glamour Sales in China in 2009. With Glamour Sales now a proven and growing business in China’s super-competitive e-commerce space, Thibault spoke to TechNode about the business and operating at the intersection of fashion, luxury and technology. Please tell us a bit about the Glamour Sales business model?

Glamour Sales is a flash sales site focusing on luxury products. We follow the European (flash sales) model of selling on consignment rather than the US model where the website operator buys all merchandise up-front. To source merchandise, we only work directly with luxury brands or their official distributors and we don’t buy and re-sell parallel imported goods for two reasons: firstly, because the margins are too low, and secondly, to ensure that through selling authentic products our business had the chance to scale. Now in China, after four years we work with 780 brands of which 95% internationally sourced brands. In terms of our China sales breakdown, we do 70% of sales with fashion, 20% with beauty and 10% with home décor/lifestyle products. In terms of fashion, we are very pretty balanced between footwear, apparel and bags and accessories and other items meaning jewelry, watches etc. How do you select the merchandise and what percentage of Glamour Sales merchandise is current versus out-of-season stock?

For all of the first-tier luxury brands, the merchandise is one to two years old, while for accessible luxury brands; we are dealing with products a few months past their season. So for brands like Dolce & Gabbana we are now selling the winter 2012 collection and for a kids brand like Jacadi we are selling the Spring/Summer 2013 collections that only just passed. We have a team of 20 people in our merchandising department and they are constantly in discussion with brands and the brands propose inventories and then the team selects what we think is most interesting for our members whether it be the style, price, or blend of both. At the end of the day what we care about is selecting the right merchandise for our members, and we also incentivize the merchandise team not only on sales but also on the sell-through.