NEW YORK -- In referring to the frenetic pace of doing business on the Web, the
cyber-savvy in the fashion sector like to say that a day on the Internet is like
a year in the brick-and-mortar world.
So it's not too surprising that a handful of new fashion and lifestyle Web sites
are aiming to carve fresh niches for the second significant e-commerce Christmas
holiday and first quarter of the new millennium. Their goal: Stand out from a
pack that's focused on basics -- often offered at a discount.
These newest players online include:
WeddingChannel.com, an all-occasion gift site that went live Monday and has established
links with a number of apparel and accessories e-tailers, including the Gap,
Banana Republic, Neiman Marcus, Gump's, Ashford.com, REI and Fogdog.com, among
others.
BestSelections.com, which focuses on unusual, design-driven items, priced from
luxury to mass. The site, originally launched in spring 1998, was closed in
mid-October and is set to reopen today, featuring sharper product images and
easier navigation.
Stacianewyork.com, a four-month-old Web site -- born of designer Stacy Johnson's
vision to take fashions from her single Brooklyn boutique to a broad-based
audience on the Web -- that has just brought in holiday styles, after surviving
its first season online.
Newyorkbaby.com, a three-month-old lifestyle site, founded by Susan Maloney,
former associate fashion editor of Esquire magazine, that is launching
e-commerce in December, while expanding into The Urban Baby Network, adding
sites in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston.
Fashion500.com, an upscale venture that will concentrate on cyber-exclusives on
designer merchandise and has plans to go live during the first quarter.
Asked what these entrants into the e-commerce fray can expect during the fourth
quarter and beyond, Mark J. Larson, national partner in charge of the retail
segment at KPMG, said: "The challenge for e-tailers this holiday is to drive
traffic to their Web sites, and provide people with service, once they get
there. Consumers will be expecting quick downloads; real-time customer service;
the ability to track their orders, and to get goods delivered in a timely
manner.
"Click-and-mortar companies are probably in the best position to grab the most
holiday business, because of their customer service and fulfillment
capabilities, and their established brand names," Larson continued. "This is not
a given, though. They still have to execute."
Among the new crop of players in cyberspace, Della.com and BestSelections.com
will rely on their e-tail partners to deliver the goods, while stacianewyork.com
is an extension of Johnson's Smith Street boutique, in Brooklyn, called Stacia
New York, which she opened in November 1998, after working for five years at
Calvin Klein, Cynthia Rowley and J. Crew.
"I don't need the large upscale retailers to carry my product, in order to reach
my customers," Johnson said. "The Internet levels the playing field between my
store and large retailers. I want customers to feel they are interacting with
the designer, not just shopping in an anonymous online store."
Stacianewyork.com enables users to see the process that resulted in the
production of a garment, by outlining the steps in the design, and describing
the inspiration behind it, which, Johnson said, helps to build a personal
shopping experience.
Noting that business has been picking up as the holidays approach, however,
Johnson admitted, "I hope I'll be able to keep up with the demand."
Stacianewyork.com's orders are being processed by an e-commerce enabler called
Salegate, and Johnson is fulfilling orders via UPS ground delivery, within seven
to 10 days after an order has been placed. Some of the items are on hand in her
boutique, but most are made to order because, as Johnson pointed out, "The
beauty of the Internet is that you don't have to carry inventory."
Currently, volume through the designer's Web site is significantly smaller than
via her shop, but as demand builds, she said, she will seek help in fulfilling
orders. "I've looked at signing on with an e-commerce enabler like a
Styleclick," Johnson said, "but it's like signing with the devil. You have to
give up too much money up front, relative to what I'm producing on the site.
"I've also looked at linking with e-commerce portals at Yahoo and Amazon,"
Johnson continued. "But they are not turnkey operations like Styleclick, and the
other deals I'd need to do to handle different [operations] would eat into my
site's sales.
"I'm trying to create a boutique environment online," Johnson added, "and I
don't want to link with an auction site, like Amazon's zShops, or with a virtual
mall, like Fashionmall.com, where my site will be overshadowed by big anchors
like Gap."
However, Johnson projected, "At some point, I'm going to get a rush of orders,
and that may make the timing right for some kind of a [partnership] deal."
Prices on the site range from $30 handbags to $200 dresses, and the items shown,
Johnson noted, are mostly those "without fit issues, like handbags, sweaters and
dresses without zippers."
For now, the designer said, the big challenge is to advertise Stacianewyork.com.
"But I'm not Gap; I can't buy an ad in Times Square," she conceded. Instead,
Johnson has been advertising in her Brooklyn shop and benefiting from some
publicity that has sprung from the site's recent inclusion in Cisco System's
Internet Indicators Report, which seeks to measure the Net's economic impact.
A different path is being pursued by BestSelections.com, which is linking with
purveyors of unusual items, in an eclectic range of categories, from apparel and
jewelry, to pet products, spa and beauty goods, and arts and antiques.
However, in their first year online, the company's executives -- Jody A. Owen,
president and chief executive officer; Roberto Devorik, president of
international operations, and Christine Merser, chairman -- found they needed to
make the merchandising more appealing and the site easier to navigate.
"We learned that people want to be in a more original environment than just a
virtual store or city site," Owen related. "They wanted [an alternative] to
drilling down to a particular item through a search engine that brought up
dozens of products that they may not have been interested in."
As a result, broad merchandise categories have been subdivided by classification
and gender. According to Owen, the categories are broken out into 185
classifications, and about 4,500 different items are being offered at the site's
launch, a number expected to rise rapidly, she said.
Visitors can begin to shop, from the home page, in a number of ways: clicking on
a merchandise category; a city site; a directory of 120 stores that soon will be
expanded to 150; a featured product category, accompanied by editorial content
that is written by BestSelection's staff, or a range of timely items.
For the site's launch, the featured category is "Cowboy Chic," while the
seasonal goods are highlighted under the header "Eight Autumn Favorites."
Favorites featured include pashmina shawls, sapphire earrings, Beluga caviar,
European wine glasses and a millennium bottle opener. Pricing ranges widely,
from $24,500 for the sapphire earrings to $145 for 1.75 ounces of caviar to $27
for the bottle opener.
"My philosophy is that everybody deserves a little luxury," Owen said of the
site's mass-to-class price structure. "We expect to pull in some younger people
with a strong sense of style, who are on limited budgets, as well as older
people who know they like caviar, but don't care about expensive jewelry, in
addition to the well-heeled fashion customer. There is a trend among today's
consumers to develop one's own style."
Added Devorik, "We are trying to give people the sense of something new, of
finding an item they perhaps had not thought about before, but without being
pretentious."
The redesigned site features sharp product images with vivid colors, but images
that accompany editorial content or form a background graphic on a screen are
soft to convey a sense of elegance.
"Unlike the three-dimensional graphics of Boo.com, we've chosen to stay flat
with our images," Owen noted. "We think that people will play at Boo.com, as
much as they will shop. We're trying to keep the focus on shopping."
"Our kaleidoscope logo is an homage to Yves Saint Laurent's colors from the
Seventies," Devorik said, in referring to hues of tangerine, Chinese red, and
fuchsia that reflect what he termed "a pure period of luxury goods, which went
over the top in the Eighties."
BestSelections.com is seeking to add to users' sense of adventure by mixing in
some content with merchandise.
By visiting a geographic site like the Hamptons, for example, users gain access
to a brief history of the area, along with 12 virtual stores, carrying 206
items. The locale's legend begins, "Welcome to the Hamptons. Although originally
famous for farming, fishing and wonderful beaches, the Hamptons is now home to
celebrities and hosts some of the best tourism and elite shopping in the U.S."
By entering a storefront, such as Sarabeth's Kitchen, consumers can click on a
small range of goods, like Sarabeth's single-jar gift box, containing 8 ounces
of preserves in any of 12 flavors, priced at $10; or enter the store by
category, in this case, by selecting "baskets" or "gourmet," or hit the
"storefront" icon and get the story behind the shop.
Editorial features on the BestSelections home page, like Cowboy Chic, will be
updated each week or so and will offer content about a fashion-lifestyle trend
and related goods. Content under the header, "Cowboy Chic: An American Classic,"
begins: "Cowboy clothes were born in the decades following the Civil War when
groups of herders led cattle through the Indian nations on the long trip up the
Chisholm Trail from Texas to Kansas."
A number of the items highlighted in the cowboy category are apparel pieces
designed by Jane Smith, whom Devorik described as the Nan Kempner of Santa Fe.
"Her interior design shop in Santa Fe is hot, so she decided to create a line of
cotton sweaters with pewter buttons that show a Native American influence,"
Devorik said.
By clicking on a featured item, like one of Smith's sweaters, users are brought
to a screen with a larger image of that product, cross-merchandised with several
related items displayed across the bottom of the screen, in this case, 10 more
of Smith's Santa Fe-inspired sweaters.
The merchandise throughout the site is eclectic, encompassing everything from
Kitty Calamari ($16) and Woof Wear embroidered wool dog coats ($130), to
Tateossian globe key rings, made of semiprecious stones set in British sterling
($250), Massab Bros. Art Deco earrings ($9,500) and Keni Valenti Chanel clip-on
earrings ($800).
BestSelections.com will spend approximately $3 million on fourth-quarter ads,
which began to roll out last week in the Wall Street Journal and Playbill, as
well as the November issues of Vogue, W, and Departures, the American Express
magazine, among other print vehicles. Holiday ads will also appear online at
NBCi.com, Women.com, Lycos, Snap and Yahoo.
"Holiday will see an inundation of dot-com ads, but it's the sites that are
really going to do the talking," Owen emphasized.
"We were getting about one million hits a month, prior to our redesign, and with
the new ads beginning, the hits were way up [last] week," she added, in
referring to the "reopening in November" sign that had been posted at
BestSelections.com.
BestSelections so far has raised $5.5 million in a private placement, and Owens
anticipates doing another round of private financing during the first quarter,
as, she said, "our visuals have been improved and the stores are very much on
board."
A different approach to gift merchandising is being taken by Della.com, the Web
site that went live Monday.
"Most existing sites are gathering various items on their own and merchandising
them," observed Rebecca Patton, Della's chief executive officer. "We are trying
to help people buy better gifts by collecting a number of high-profile retailers
on our site and pairing them with effective shopping tools.
"People have a hard time finding appropriate gift items to give," Patton said,
"especially as their relation to the recipient grows more distant, with families
and friends scattered across the country."
Less difficult, according to Patton, has been finding retailers to sign on to
Della .com, which also incorporates the company's online wedding registry,
formerly known as WeddingChannel.com , that was launched in June 1998. WeddingChannel.com's e-tail partners, like Neiman Marcus and Crate & Barrel, said Patton, "liked
how we treated their brands and wanted to be on a site with other quality
retailers."
"Crate & Barrel and Banana Republic aren't about the cheapest selection of wine
glasses or apparel," Patton noted. "I think that what a lot of sites have missed
is that people want an edited shopping experience on the Web."
Shopping aids at Della.com include a wish list that enables users to send gift
recipients a playful e-card, asking them for a gift wish, which is collected in
the gift givers' "Wishlist;" " Della's Picks," a range of recommendations,
culled on the site, including a tool called "Star Treatment" that features
celebrities' gift ideas, and "Occasion Reminders."
Gift orders will be fulfilled by Della.com's merchant partners and, beginning
in the first quarter, Amazon.com will drive customer traffic to Della through an
opt-in gift wish list. TV and radio spots to support the site are set to begin
shortly in Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Dallas, Houston, New York and
Washington.
Della .com raised $45 million, in September, via investments from some of its
retail partners and venture capital funds: Neiman Marcus, Williams-Sonoma, Crate
& Barrel, Amazon.com and two venture capital firms in Menlo Park, Calif.:
Trinity Ventures and Kliener, Perkins, Caufield, Byers.
One widely acknowledged challenge facing the pure dot-com players in the apparel
sector is their need to compensate for the lack of the brand equity earned by,
say, the Gap, or Lands' End, in addition the need to outsource order
fulfillment, among other operations, and sacrifice some controls.
For Fashion500.com, an upscale site targeting a first-quarter launch, the answer
lies, in part, in its plan to deal in online exclusives. "We will only deal with
designers on an exclusive basis online," said Michael Bereck, founder and chief
executive officer of Fashion500.com. He did not specify the labels the site will
merchandise, however, or how many items it plans to open with.
"We don't want to ruin the image of the brands with pricing that's too
competitive," Bereck said.
"Our model is controlled distribution," he added, predicting that fashion
products on price-driven sites are "going to become commoditized."
"Fashion500.com will not be just a featured-item site," Bereck pointed out. "We
are looking to make a broader selection of merchandise available to our
customers. One of the primary reasons people are disappointed in shopping online
is that the item they are looking for isn't available in their size, or in the
color they are looking for."
Noting that he spent a few years consulting for brick-and-mortar retailers on
developing Internet strategies, Bereck said his own e-commerce start-up will
fulfill orders through a distribution center Fashion 500 has developed, as well
as through a third-party partnership it has struck.
"A major marketing effort online and off-line is scheduled to break concurrent
with the launch of Fashion500.com," Bereck said, without elaborating.
Despite the flurry of dot-com start-ups in the past two years, there are still
plenty of voids to be filled online. That's how former fashion editor and
stylist Susan Maloney got the idea for The Urban Baby Network: She found a
dearth of localized information, and merchandise, for expectant mothers and
their babies during her own pregnancy.
"Information in the traditional media was not terribly current, and online
sources were not aimed specifically at a local audience," related Maloney, who
is the site's founder and editor in chief. "The Net can contain volumes of
information, and can be changed in real-time to keep that information current.
Newyorkbaby.com was conceived as a comprehensive resource guide with a store."
The store, set to be launched in December on Newyorkbaby.com and on sister sites
to be launched at that time in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston, will
offer unusual gift items and decorative objects, as well as apparel, all aimed
at a sophisticated audience.
The Urban Baby Network has just signed on Jennifer Blum, children's buyer at
Barneys New York, as its buyer, Maloney said. "Sixty-six percent of Internet
users are living in the 50 largest cities in the U.S.," stated John Maloney,
president of The Urban Baby Network, and Susan's husband.
"This is the audience we are aiming at, by offering less-mainstream merchandise,
and graphics designed by Ruben Toledo," noted the site's founder. "We wanted to
avoid the pink-and-blue, cutsie look of a lot of the national sites.
