Successful lifestyle brands know how to create an experience for their customers. Transposing the physical pleasures of fashion into satisfying online experiences is the problem. As published by Vogue business, new technologies are emerging, but the front lines are not consumer-facing digital fashion shows. Instead it’s showrooms, the connection points between brands and retail buyers, that have become the playground for luxury fashion’s digital experiments. Brunello Cucinelli, seemingly the apex of IRL exclusive luxury, is banking on NuOrder, a virtual showroom platform that digitizes the wholesale buying process, once a task that could take teams of people weeks to execute. On NuOrder, brands and buyers can easily sort and subdivide product by color, size, category, or other tags, build a digital shopping cart. It’s a seamless alternative to market week when retailers hit the road with Excel spreadsheets and budgets to shop the collections and determine the products that will define a season’s sales. Now all of it happens with the ease of ordering from Amazon Prime. The platform charges partners for membership, but is flexible in its implementation. Saks Fifth Avenue has signed up to be a long-term partner with NuOrder; as a result every brand stocked at Saks can be onboarded to NuOrder free of charge.
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