Digital and luxury - Solca: «Handle with care»

The advent of the digital era has dictated new rules in the world of fashion and luxury, and it is good to work to avoid short-circuits in the value of companies.

Luca Solca, Bernstein's senior analyst for the Global Luxury Goods sector, indicated 8 trends to keep an eye on during his speech at the Ceo Roundtable on Commerce Innovation.

Starting from communication, from social media to the world of opinion leaders: "Posting is easy but it is necessary to check what you post and when professionally".

In parallel, the way of presenting the collections is evolving, as in the case of Moncler, which organized a large party open to the public in Milan, during the February fashion week, attracting 200,000 people in two days against the 500-1,000 people of a traditional fashion show.

For directly managed distribution channels, the goal is to make e-commerce work and bring traffic back to physical stores. Finally, the retail network is not very effective, with each boutique being the same as the others: rule number one is recognition only if combined with experience.

"On the wholesale front, however, we must pay attention to the loss of price control", and watch out for the new retail giants, from Amazon to Alibaba, which can take advantage of the collection and analysis of millions of data in real time.

On the market, brands are establishing themselves with an alternative business model that allows lower sales prices for the same intrinsic value and, in general, digital technology is undermining consolidated balances, so much so that there has been a decline in sales of watches with a price lower than 500 dollars.

"Artificial intelligence will not replace human intelligence, but will serve to give information to companies to make them more effective and reduce their margins of error."