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along with the rest of the country under the recession. But this year, they’re beginning to bounce back. Greg Furman, president of the Luxury Marketing Council, says internet sales played a role in that change.
“Neiman Marcus I think really set the stage for this. There was a wonderful person named Brenden Hoffman, who’s now the head of Lord & Taylor. And he took the online business, which was basically a remaindering business, from Neiman Marcus over a period of some five years to a $600 million business, when many of the luxury brands felt the web was a mass medium and that the conventional wisdom was luxury brands couldn’t be sold online and he proved them wrong.”
Furman says more and more luxury brands view the web as a viable channel and realize that affluent consumers are also some of the most sophisticated users of technology.
