LVMH, 24 Sèvres
Product Strategy Lead, contract, 2015–2016
- 150+
- brands at launch, the only site selling both Dior and Louis Vuitton
- Greenfield
- platform defined with LVMH's first chief digital officer
Context
In late 2015 LVMH hired its first chief digital officer and set out to build something the group had never had: a multi-brand ecommerce platform of its own. The product became 24 Sèvres, a digital counterpart to Le Bon Marché, the 180-year-old Paris department store on rue de Sèvres. It launched in 2017 with more than 150 brands and was the only multi-brand site selling both Dior and Louis Vuitton. It trades today as 24S.
I was brought in as Product Strategy Lead for the definition phase, working with LVMH's digital leadership and members of the founding family.
Problem
Net-a-Porter and Farfetch had spent a decade learning how to sell luxury online. LVMH owned the brands but not the channel, and the group's instinct, reasonably, was that its houses should not be presented the way a marketplace presents a commodity.
So the brief carried a contradiction. Build something competitive with the incumbents, without adopting the mechanics that made them competitive. Filter-and-sort, price-led merchandising and infinite grids are how you shop efficiently, and they are also how you make a Dior handbag look like a search result.
My role
Product strategy and the full UX stack for the definition phase: competitive analysis, experience mapping, personas, sitemaps, user flows and wireframes across iOS, Android and responsive web. I led C-level workshops and managed and mentored the UX, design and strategy teams working on it.
This was the definition phase. The platform launched around eighteen months after my engagement ended, and I make no claim on the build.
Insight
The department store already solved this. Le Bon Marché does not present Dior and a lesser label as equivalent rows in a table. It gives houses space, sightlines and adjacency, and the building itself does the merchandising. That is an information architecture, and it is a very old one.
The competitive question was not how to out-filter Net-a-Porter. It was which of LVMH's existing advantages had no digital equivalent yet, and could not be copied by a pure-play retailer.
Product decisions
Model the store, not the catalogue.
Structure the experience around curated space and editorial adjacency rather than a filterable grid, so that a house arrives with context. This is slower to browse by design. The alternative, a conventional faceted catalogue, would have shipped faster and made every brand look interchangeable.
Treat brand-owner constraints as product requirements, not obstacles.
Each house has rules about how it may be shown, priced and adjacent to others. On a marketplace those rules read as friction. Here they were the differentiator, because no competitor could get that permission. The architecture had to make them expressible rather than fight them.
Define the platform in workshops, not documents.
The decisions needed executives and house representatives to agree in the room. A strategy deck circulated afterwards gets renegotiated by everyone who was not there. Running it as facilitated sessions produced positions that survived.
Prototype across all three surfaces from the start.
Mobile, tablet and desktop shopping behave differently in luxury, where a phone is often the discovery surface and the purchase happens later on a larger screen. Defining one and adapting it afterwards would have baked in the wrong assumptions.
Execution
Short, dense engagement. Competitive teardown, research and experience mapping into structure, structure into flows and wireframes, tested through C-level workshops with the people who would have to live with the result.
Outcome
24 Sèvres launched in 2017 with more than 150 brands, twenty of them LVMH houses, and was the only multi-brand platform carrying both Dior and Louis Vuitton. It remains in operation as 24S.
Public sources: Business of Fashion and FashionUnited on the 2017 launch. The internal work is confidential and no artefacts are published here.
What I learned
Constraints from powerful stakeholders are usually where the defensible product is hiding. The rules the houses imposed looked like the hardest part of the brief and turned out to be the only part a competitor could not replicate.
I also learned how much a short engagement can decide. Three months of definition set structure that was still visible in a platform that launched a year and a half later, which is an argument for putting your best thinking at the front of a project rather than the middle.