Beauty and fashion started to find common ground with Amazon. Premium brands that avoided the platform in the past, including Clinique and Coach, are suddenly using it. Kiehl’s, from 1851, debuted on Amazon to make their products accessible.
The change signifies an acknowledgement of two basic facts: millions of customers shop on Amazon every day and a large number of brands are already available there through direct partnerships or the grey market. Even though the Luxury Stores division will start in 2020, there aren’t many actual luxury companies on the platform, despite the influx of expensive fashion and cosmetics brands. Still, Amazon keeps trying to make itself more appealing to fashionable individuals.
Amazon’s U.S. apparel, shoe and accessory sales last year totalled $56.4 billion, taking into account the value of products sold by third parties on the company’s marketplace. According to the sources, Amazon’s dominance in the fashion industry is evident from its sales to consumers, which surpass Walmart Inc.’s $29.5 billion gross merchandise value by over 90%. Companies are still joining the Amazon ecosystem with caution.
One of the more accessible luxury brands, Coach, is now available on Amazon. However, the CEO of Tapestry Inc., Joanne Crevoiserat, has described Coach’s Amazon experiment as “pretty small.”
“Amazon is important,” Crevoiserat said. “We know that younger consumers are searching and discovering brands on that platform and we wanted to put our best foot forward there. We are pleased with the engagement we are seeing so far. It is small, but we are happy with it.”
