It’s also one of the few sectors where the in-store experience plays an important role in justifying premium prices through personalized and emotionally engaging customer experiences. While ecommerce has reshaped many industries over the past decade, luxury fashion has been slower to embrace this digital transformation—and for good reason: 80 percent of luxury sales happen in stores.
But here’s the paradox: while ecommerce platforms offer a longer customer engagement window, most luxury fashion brands squander it by mimicking mass-market strategies. They prioritize functionality over feeling, adopting the design and UX playbooks of fast fashion brands—brands with entirely different customer bases, price points and purchase behaviors.
Luxury’s real danger isn’t in resisting digital transformation—it’s in using it the wrong way. Many luxury brands are using strategies from the wrong playbook. This includes assessing how well a luxury fashion brand’s digital experience reflects and enhances its brand’s core values, how effectively it captivates and retains consumer attention, and how seamlessly it bridges the online and offline worlds.
Earlier this year, as part of their “Rose des Vents” jewelry campaign, Christian Dior Couture experimented with a virtual try-on format and saw an increase of 17 percent in respondents recognizing the brand as premium. This is more than just a tactical shift—it’s a strategic rethink. In the digital age, the brands that will thrive are those that use technology not as a shortcut but as a tool for deeper engagement, richer storytelling and emotional connection.