LVMH / 24 Sèvres
Defining a digital department store for the world’s leading luxury group.
- Scope
- Product strategy and UX
- Platforms
- iOS, Android and responsive web
- Period
- 2015–2016
- Phase
- Definition
Context
LVMH owned the houses, but not the multi-brand channel.
In late 2015, LVMH was defining its first multi-brand ecommerce platform. Net-a-Porter and Farfetch had spent years establishing how luxury fashion was discovered and bought online. LVMH had something they did not: direct relationships with the world’s most valuable luxury houses and ownership of Le Bon Marché.
The brief was to turn that advantage into a digital product without reducing each house to a logo, price and thumbnail in a conventional marketplace grid.
Strategic idea
Model the department store, not the catalogue.
Le Bon Marché already solved the problem in physical space. It gives houses room, controls their adjacency and uses curation to create a point of view. The store itself is an information architecture.
That became the product idea. Rather than compete on the number of filters or the speed of reaching a product grid, the platform would translate the department store’s editorial authority, privileged access and Parisian perspective into digital form.
Definition
Turn a strategic position into a platform teams could build.
The definition phase moved from competitive analysis and research into experience maps, personas, sitemaps, flows and wireframes across responsive web, iOS and Android. C-level workshops were used to settle the decisions that crossed product, brand and individual house requirements.
BVS led the product strategy and full UX stack, while directing and mentoring the UX, design and strategy teams around one platform model.
- Competitive analysis
- Experience mapping
- Personas and research
- Sitemaps and user flows
- Wireframes and prototypes
- Executive workshops
Key decisions
Use the constraints of luxury as the product’s advantage.
Curate before filtering
Give products and houses editorial context before exposing the full machinery of catalogue navigation.
Make house rules structural
Encode how brands could be shown, priced and placed alongside one another instead of treating those requirements as exceptions.
Decide in the room
Use workshops to reach positions that executives and house representatives had shaped together, rather than circulate a strategy for later renegotiation.
Define every surface together
Work across responsive web, iOS and Android from the start so discovery, consideration and purchase did not become separate product interpretations.
Public outcome
A global luxury platform carrying more than 150 brands.
24 Sèvres launched in June 2017 as the online counterpart to Le Bon Marché. It opened with more than 150 brands, including roughly twenty LVMH houses, and was the only multi-brand platform carrying both Dior and Louis Vuitton. The business continues today as 24S.
Public sources: Vogue France on the launch assortment and LVMH on 24 Sèvres and Le Bon Marché. The BVS engagement covered the definition phase, not the later build.
The brand constraints looked like friction. They were the part competitors could not copy.