Alison Loehnis Sets Her Sights On Expanding Net-a-Porter’s Global Luxury Offering Like Never Before
Alison Loehnis, president of luxury e-commerce juggernaut Net-a-Porter, can instinctively imagine who her customer aspires to be. Now she’s using her intuition and the momentum of the brand to expand the sartorial horizons of today’s global woman
I have so many burning questions to ask Alison when I sit down to talk with her on her most recent trip to Dubai. But as we launch into conversation, she seems to be just as curious about me. By the end of our time together, I realise that she would have learned almost as much about me as I did about her. And it strikes me that this genuine curiosity about other people not only reveals who Alison is as a person, but also defines her genius and explains the continued success of Net-a-Porter.
Net-a-Porter was the pioneer of luxury e-commerce. It was the first retailer to anticipate the needs of the growing number of women around the world who wanted high-end fashion to come to them. Over the years, it has effectively helped mould the visual identity of cosmopolitan female modernity. In essence, candid concern for the customer and lots of business savvy has led Net-a-Porter to become an internationally recognised brand that represents the aesthetic sensibility of the stylish, sophisticated global woman.
Alison has Ralph Lauren to thank for setting her off on her career path. “It all started there,” she confirms, referring to her first brush with retail as a college student working at the Ralph Lauren store in East Hampton. “The best thing you can do if you want to get into this industry is to work on a shop floor… The training I received and my love for the customer and selling product and seeing how, even though we aren’t saving lives, fashion can make you feel put together and give you a bit of a lift.”
She graduated from Brown University with a degree in art history, spent a stint in advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi, was a creative executive at Disney and had a marketing job at Thomas Pink, a menswear brand that is part of the LMVH stable. “It’s not like I graduated from university and was like oh I want to work in fashion,” she laughs. “My CV is pretty varied, and at the time, I remember having to explain the throughline, and I was considered a little bit strange and now it’s hilarious, people are saying to me – I love the diversity!” Alison has been at Net-a-Porter since 2007 and was instrumental in rolling out some of the company’s major projects, including the launch of The Outnet back in 2009 and Mr Porter in 2011, the same year she was appointed as president of the company.
Customers have come to trust Net-a-Porter’s elevated curation to the degree that it can venture beyond just presenting the usual line-up of luxury designers and introduce new regional brands, adding a richness and eclecticism to its offering. As Alison proudly states, “Our customers come to us for discovery.” The company has designated buyers for the Middle East market who are constantly sourcing new talent – for which she says Instagram has been a major player. Several regional brands have even been on-boarded through its competitive mentorship program, called The Vanguard.
Two years ago, the company astutely launched a localised English-Arabic website and app for the Middle East with prices in local currency. It has since introduced a series of exclusive capsule collections, Ramadan edits and regionally produced campaigns. These campaigns are a savvy investment, as they assimilate the fashionable Middle Eastern woman with the image of the Net-a-Porter woman – someone who operates within the high-status world of professionals for whom fashion is no longer defined by borders.
The perfect example of this sartorial twist on the “think global, act local” concept is the recent addition of the Dubai-based brand Dima Ayad to the website’s offering. When asked what went into this decision, Alison explains that it’s not just about targeting a local market, but rather about filling a gap in the Net-a-Porter assortment. “We are looking for differentiation. A point of view that’s different from anything else we’re seeing.” She continues, “We were really drawn to her use of colour. I think that was the first eye-catching thing. Her collections and her silhouettes are so distinctive. What we love is the size diversity and inclusivity. I love the idea that she goes from extra small to quadruple XL. That provides a way in for so many different customers. The pieces are so elegant, but you can scrunch them up in a ball in your suitcase and they look immaculate.” Part of Net-a-Porter’s success lies in its ingenious ability to source a vast stable of brands from around the world that have clear local relevance and name recognition, whether it be in Tokyo, London or Dubai, but have a broad enough vision to attract a global fanbase. “Dima is very well known in the region, but in fact, the product is selling everywhere,” Alison says.
Because of its growing reach in the Middle East, Net-a-Porter is at the forefront of broadening the definition of what modern modest fashion looks like. It’s a move that is both an astute marketing play and a clever way to tap into new revenue streams.“Modestwear is not just regionally specific and we’ve had demand for modestwear for quite some time,” shares Alison.
But the integration of regional vestimentary codes has gone further than that under Alison’s watch. Gone are the days of collaborating with brands to just design exclusive kaftans. “The market was saying ‘we want more’… This year we have 50 or so exclusives.” Curations like Net-a-Porter’s Modest Edit are showing women how to organically style conservative pieces from an array of international designers. These edits strike a chord with many women of all ages and sizes who are seeking to adhere to not just religious practices, but perhaps conservative professional dress codes as well. And as Dima Ayad’s creations showcase, modest dress has grown in spectrum with regards to silhouette and colour. Net-a-Porter’s investment in the stylistic evolution of this category is serving to raise the cultural capital of modest dress, and more importantly, to solidify it as its own marketing ideal for women around the globe.
With the consumer as her life-long lodestar, Alison continues to be attuned to what they desire, on multiple fronts. A focus of late has been for the company to develop its own circular shopping platform. “We found out that three-quarters of our customer base would be interested in reselling, of which the majority are already doing it,” she explains. In markets where the consumer is of a younger, more environmentally conscious demographic, such as in Saudi Arabia (where the younger generation has a lot of purchasing power), there is an ever-increasing demand for sustainable fashion. “So we partnered with a company in the UK called Reflaunt who have powered our engine in enabling resale. And we are going to be rolling it out in the region. And we think this will really resonate with our Saudi customer in particular.”
Taking a page out of Steve Jobs’ playbook, Alison’s deep interest in the customer allows her to have an intuition about what they want before their desires can even be articulated. As the marketing genius par excellence famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Motivated to inspire and bring even just a touch of sartorial joy to her aspirational customer, Alison, with her honed, savvy business sense and prescient instinct for deciphering market trends, is the woman who is knows what Net-a-Porter’s customers need to explore next.
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s May 2023 issue.