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Luxury Brands Move Spending To Web

Highly trafficked fashion Web sites are starting to lure major luxury brands, like Fendi, Valentino Fashion Group and Bottega Veneta, to the Web. Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, has sold its first set of video ads to Fendi, which jump out as a full-screen, 15-second video pop-up before showing Style.com's videos of new collections. This will appear just in time for the Italian fashion shows; Fashion Week in New York concluded last week. In all, Style.com lined up 88 advertisers plugging next season's spring dresses during Fashion Week--a 54 percent jump over last year. This marks a significant departure for fashion designers, who rack up about $14 billion in sales each year, and have traditionally kept their media spending to print. Style.com employs an in-house staff to help fashion marketers, many of whom are newbies to online advertising, create ads, and execute online marketing campaigns. Luxury brands have been some of the slowest advertisers to move online, as many high-fashion brands, like Prada and Hermés, have traditionally been family operations solely focused on their products, stores and services. The new online ad push is a big reason for the rise of sites like Style.com, which boasts a 58 percent year-to-date revenue increase over last year.

Read the whole story at BusinessWeek »

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