LONDON — The band is back together.
Net-a-porter and Mr Porter veterans Heather Kaminetsky and Toby Bateman have assembled their teams, set their strategies and begun rewriting the sites’ music for a new generation, and for one-time fans who may have drifted away.
Some of the new team members are former colleagues from the early days of Net and Mr Porter who built the e-commerce platforms in the very early days of smartphones and social media, and when demand for luxury was seemingly insatiable.
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Kaminetsky has brought back Claudia Plant, Net’s “employee number one” and a cofounder of the company when it launched in 1999. Her new title is chief brand and customer officer, where she oversees marketing, brand and content.
At Mr Porter, Bateman has reinstalled a number of old colleagues including Jeremy Langmead, the retailer’s founding editor in chief. His new title is brand director, and he’s overseeing digital and video content as well as the online Journal.
Here, Kaminetsky and Bateman talk about their strategies and ambitions for both sites, the importance of servicing customers, educating them and capturing their imagination in what continues to be a difficult time for the luxury business.
Heather Kaminetsky, chief executive officer, Net-a-porter
When she first returned to the Net offices in London last year, Kaminetsky cried.
“It was very emotional to be back — there were incredible people who worked really, really hard here over the years,” said Kaminetsky, who served as Net-a-porter’s vice president, global marketing until 2016 before joining Mytheresa in 2021 as president of North America.
After the tears dried, Kaminetsky got down to work with the aim of “reigniting the magic” and sparking customers’ interest in the retailer once again.
That meant putting a sharper focus on product and customer service and ramping up the inspiration and styling advice through Net’s online magazine, Porter.
It also meant refining the shoots on the site, showing women the different ways of styling the new Gucci shoe, or Brunello Cucinelli sweater.
Like any good CEO, she also set her mind to building a profitable, full-price business on the back of Net’s 425 brands, where bestselling names include Saint Laurent, Gucci, Bottega, Balenciaga, Alaïa, Chloé, Valentino and Cucinelli.
She’s brought in Brigitte Chartrand, formerly of Ssense, as chief buying and merchandising officer who oversees all categories, and who’s been putting a renewed focus on runway looks and trends.
Chartrand is bringing back old favorites such as Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe, while also ensuring that emerging designers remain a substantial part of the mix.
Kaminetsky doesn’t want to go broad with the offer, though. “We’re trying to adjust the buy so that it’s more focused. The customer wants seasonal, they want runway, they want the now, but we’re not doing anything drastic to increase or decrease the number of brands. There will be no massive swings one way or another,” she said.
She has also put a renewed focus on the fashion dream. “Our job is to create this incredible world of storytelling through editorial and product curation,” said Kaminetsky, adding that the EIP, or extremely important, big-spending people, in particular are craving additional styling advice.
“This customer holidays 10 to 12 times a year, and even if she’s just going away for the weekend, she wants to know what to wear and how to wear it. And that storytelling is something that we’re trying to do more and more,” said Kaminetsky.
The EIP, she added, is always top of mind. Net is not only supporting the high-spending customer with service, styling and special events, but it’s also taking cues from those time-poor, multitasking professional women who are often making their orders at midnight — or later.
Those EIPs remain key for Net, and for the big brands, amid a slowdown in luxury spending. Fortunately for all retailers, the EIPs’ enthusiasm for shopping isn’t waning.
Net is treating them with extra care, taking them on trips and inviting them to dinners and special events. It is also offering “secret shops” of special pieces and new collections, which are not visible on the rest of the site.
Since the start of the year, Net hosted EIPs at the new One&Only Moonlight Basin and at Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Mont.; the Melbourne Open with Ralph Lauren, and invited them to dinner with Willy Chavarria to mark the launch of his brand’s womenswear on the site.
While the EIP may be top of mind, Kaminetsky and her team haven’t forgotten about the broader customer base, with campaigns reminding them of same-day delivery services in London and New York, by adding more personal shoppers and fine-tuning the retailer’s messaging.
Kaminetsky admits that Net was no longer top of mind for some customers “but through marketing, and through our premier delivery service, we really have activated a lot of what I would define as ‘win-back customers.’ These are both aspirational and extremely important customers. It’s not that they didn’t like Net-a-porter; we just were not a part of their day-to-day,” she said.
As the customer base grows, she plans to add more personal shoppers and also sees Porter as an “incredible engine” both for driving the business and engaging customers with lifestyle content and stylish celebrity cover stars, including Amanda Seyfried, Sophie Turner and Serena Williams.
“We want to show that Net-a-porter is a place for incredible women. And we really want to service these incredible women, and new customers, too.”
Asked about the challenges of differentiating Net from Mytheresa, Kaminetsky argues that the two have a 10 percent customer crossover and can happily co-exist.
“Each has a different customer. Just look at the home page of each one, because home pages are a retailer’s windows on the world, and place for storytelling,” she said.
It’s clear from a glance at both home pages that Mytheresa, which carries 260 womenswear brands, is the chic, older sister to Net’s trendy, more experimental sibling.
Net’s home page is more focused on styling, and seeing how seasonal looks work together, while Mytheresa carries fewer brands, focuses on lifestyle, with womenswear sharing space on the wider site with men’s, kids and home.
Kaminetsky is confident about the future.
“I truly believe Net-a-porter will be the authority of fashion again. There’s a magic to the community and a belief — internally, externally, among brands and customers — that Net is going to be at the top of its game again,” she said.
Toby Bateman, CEO, Mr Porter
Bateman, who served as managing director of Mr Porter from 2015 to 2019, and who returned last year to take up the top job, is an evangelist for men’s fashion.
He sees Mr Porter not only as the go-to platform for clothing, accessories, lifestyle and culture, but as a men’s magazine, style adviser and service provider.
“There is nothing with the breadth, depth and reach of Mr Porter. It’s the only dedicated men’s platform for multibrand, luxury fashion retail,” he said in an interview at the companies’ shared headquarters in Westfield London.
If anything has changed over the years, “it’s the service proposition, the education and advice that Mr Porter offers. Today, we have a more open dialogue with customers. Whether they’re EIP or not, Mr Porter wants to be there for them,” he said.
Bateman is particularly proud that Mr Porter can reach beyond the world capitals to help to educate and inform men in all corners of the globe. “We are completely open, visible and accessible to everyone,” he said.
Mr Porter’s biggest single market is the U.S., which represents around 50 percent of sales. Bateman said that, of late, Mr Porter has been gaining traction in secondary cities in Florida, Texas and other states that weren’t really on the radar even five years ago.
The customer service proposition is multilayered and, as with Net, there is a big focus on the EIP customer.
Over the past year Bateman and his team have begun engaging more with the EIPs, hosting events around the world — in Hong Kong, New York, Miami and London — sometimes in cooperation with brands, sometimes not.
Bateman said it’s been an education for him personally, chatting with these men over dinner and exchanging ideas.
Mr Porter has also ramped up its personal shopping service.
He said EIP customers are “highly engaged with their personal shoppers.” They get a first look at collections 48 hours before they’ve even dropped on the site, with the personal shopper offering to reserve special pieces.
“When we launched, people didn’t really understand personal shopping, but I think more men have started to appreciate the real benefits of the service. They can see all the advice they’re getting from their personal shopper and are embracing that full experience, whereas in the old days it was more transactional,” he said.
Similar to Net, Mr Porter is also trying to engage with a wider pool of customers and is working to win them back with brand activations and daily content on the website and social media.
Langmead, a journalist and former magazine editor, has been creating slick lifestyle content that’s meant to speak to a variety of men. Over the past year he’s created a series of videos and fashion shoots called “Man’s Best Friend,” about men and their dogs.
The men (and the dogs) hail from a variety of backgrounds and the men are all pictured wearing clothing from Mr P., the retailer’s bestselling, in-house collection. They amble through the countryside, row on lakes, and talk about how their dogs help them deal with the day-to-day, and manage stress.
Although customers can shop the Mr P. looks in the videos, the focus is really the man-dog relationship, rather than the merchandise, said Bateman. The content also aligns with a mental health charity that Mr Porter supports called Health in Mind.
He said customers are responding with gusto to Mr Porter’s daily content on social media as well as the online Journal. “We see through the data and the engagement with our stories that men really value the content. They value the advice,” he said.
Mr Porter has been working on a number of fronts to engage customers old and new. Bateman said with tech support from its parent LuxExperience group, his team is able to use AI tools to track customer engagement and retention like never before.
“The business is full of data. We can analyze, for example, which of our customers has not shopped in the last 12 months. We can do that every month, or every week. And we can also look at how many of those customers we’ve won back this week versus the same week last year. To be successful you have to have a strong customer base that is loyal,” he said.
He added that Mr Porter also services the 325-plus brands on the site. “We aim to be additive. By working with Mr Porter, brands reach a variety of men and are also styled in a slightly different way compared with their own websites,” he said, adding their pieces are also mixed with those of other brands.
The competition between Mr Porter and Mytheresa menswear is minimal, with a customer overlap of around 10 percent, similar to Net and Mytheresa womenswear.
He believes there is room for many players in what has become a more democratic, yet refined, menswear world.
“Age barriers have completely gone. The lines have blurred, and we’re seeing ageless, timeless dressing,” said Bateman, adding that men of all ages are thinking about what looks contemporary, and what suits their personal style rather than adhering to old-fashioned notions of dressing.
“That probably wasn’t the case 10 years ago, but it is now,” he said.
Menswear has generally become more refined and casual while office dressing is now dominated by contemporary brands, he said.
“The customer has changed, fashion tastes have evolved, and things are definitely more casual than they used to be. But that doesn’t mean they’re not smart,” he added.
Bateman said two contemporary brands worth looking at are A. Presse, a Japanese label that reproduces vintage American and European workwear and military clothing, and Auralee, another Japanese name that’s brimming with roomy, relaxed classics in cashmere, silk, linen and wool.
Bateman said that with the trend for quiet luxury persisting, quality and silhouette have become increasingly important.
“I think a lot of menswear at the moment is about the silhouette. Because [this moment] is quiet, and not very logo or streetwear driven, the defining factor is the silhouette,” he said adding that Mr Porter will continue to deliver the best ones on the market.
“The buyers’ roles are to scour the world and to make an edit of the best brands in a very Mr Porter way. Having that point of view is increasingly important. We want the site to be positive, aspirational, and for the customer to see an image of themselves reflected back in Mr Porter,” he said.
