My experience

Hello everyone and welcome,

First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Gilles de La Portbarré, i am a frenchman of 35 years old, living in Paris.
I have been working for Louis Vuitton Malletier for 8 years now on the Internet Department.
At the beginning of my career I was in charge of developping the e-commerce in the USA for Louis Vuitton on the multi brand website http://www.eluxury.com/ which belongs to the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Group (LVMH). It was the very beginning of the sale of luxury products on the Web, even Neiman Marcus was not selling on the Web when we started ! We had to think about our product assortment, iconic products or very fashion items ?, our online communication: it is expensive and does it worth it ? (same question than today isnt'it). How can we attract new customers etc. Well the very basic questions and we had no pros to help us at that time. And yet we did it: our shop online becomes one of the most important stores in the USA within 3 years. I will explain in another article how we achieved that performance.

After I launched the new version of the Louis Vuitton Web site which is still online today. You can have a look on http://www.vuitton.com/. It was our 3rd Web site version and after the success of our shop in the shop on eluxury.com we decided to launch the e-commerce on our own site and manage it by ourselves. We starting by France which is the native country of our Company. The real challenge of this Web site was to balance the efficiency of an ecommerce Website and the necessary dream of luxury, I think we managed it even if you can still see some tricky things on our Web site due to some internal political issues... Again I will explain you how we did it on a coming article.

2 years ago I have been asked to roll out our e-commerce platform worldwide, starting with Japan and then USA (yes on our Website, a direct competition with our shop in the shop on elux). And what an experience to work with such different cultures than ours: Japan, US and Europe have all their way of managing a project, you need to be quiet flexible to jump from one to the other. It will be the subject of a coming article.

And now I am working on a confidential project... I will let you know in the coming weeks.