“The plan is always ambitious and long-term.”
Federico Marchetti, chairman and chief executive officer of the Yoox Net-a-Porter Group has no doubts, detailing the online retailer’s three-year strategic plan to WWD. “I would not have invented Yoox in 1999 if my plans were not ambitious, and I see the same with [parent company Compagnie Financière] Richemont, too. They are a long-term shareholder, with a long-term view, and they expect ambitious plans from us. We are very much aligned on this.”
It’s a sunny day at the YNAP headquarters here, literally and figuratively, as Marchetti takes stock of the company’s five-day Cyber Weekend performance. From Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, the group saw two orders every second, up from last year, with some of its sites recording up to five orders a second. “Italians, the British and Americans generally bought after lunch or at lunchtime, while the Japanese after dinner at around 10 p.m.,” Marchetti shared.
During those five days, two-thirds of orders were placed on mobile. “We saw a peak of 90 percent of orders via mobile during Cyber Weekend for certain stores,” he said.
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YNAP’s active customers now total 4 million, compared with Farfetch’s most recently reported 1.9 million, noted Marchetti.
Mobile has long been pivotal to the group’s strategy. “I have been obsessed with mobile since 2006, a year before the launch of the iPhone and I put together a task force on mobile because I believed that at one point most of e-commerce would be made through portable phones — and this remains an integral part of our three-year plan,” explained Marchetti in his staple straightforward and on-point manner. “Mobile is at the center of our strategy. It’s been one of the main initiatives after the merger with Net-a-Porter. Mobile first pertains to everything, from buying to merchandising.”
This story was reported by WWD and originally appeared on WWD.com.
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