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Strategy
LuxExperience: Rewriting the playbook for luxury e-commerce
As luxury e-commerce enters a new chapter, shifting consumer expectations, rising costs, and mounting sustainability demands are testing the resilience of every player. LuxExperience CEO Michael Kliger shares how it is navigating this future through discipline, loyalty, and a relentless focus on execution.
When Michael Kliger took on the task of integrating Net-a-Porter and Mr Porter into a new group structure under LuxExperience, he knew the scale of the challenge.
“It was open-heart surgery,” said Kliger, who previously held the role of Vice President International at eBay before joining Mytheresa as CEO in 2015, at a recent Luxury 2050 Forum C-Suite Talk.
LuxExperience was established in 2025 when German luxury e-commerce site Mytheresa acquired Net-a-Porter, Mr Porter, Yoox, and The Outnet. The deal created one of Europe’s largest multi-brand luxury e-commerce players but also left Kliger with the daunting task of stitching together businesses with very different legacies, infrastructures, and cultures.
The consolidation followed a turbulent period for luxury e-commerce over the past decade. While online luxury retail continued to thrive in Asia and the US, with Tmall’s Luxury Pavilion becoming an indispensable gateway to Chinese consumers, eBay building a solid position in resale, and even Amazon steadily testing the waters, in Europe, many pioneers faltered. European luxury brands were reluctant to back platforms, preferring to direct customers to their boutiques. Experiments such as LVMH’s 24S and Richemont’s ownership of Yoox Net-a-Porter ultimately faltered.
The past few years have only sharpened these challenges. A recessionary climate has hit consumer spending, just as brands grapple with the promises and pitfalls of generative AI. The metaverse, once hailed as the next frontier, has struggled to live up to its early hype. At the same time, sustainability pressures are mounting, forcing leaders to rethink business models, supply chains, and customer engagement.
According to Kliger, survival comes down to one thing. “Eighty percent of success or failure is done on execution, not on strategy,” he said. In a sector where rivals lost their way, LuxExperience has shown that resilience depends not on grand visions, but on relentless delivery. That discipline is reflected in the numbers: Mytheresa has grown net sales by 8%, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 4.3% in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2025.
The wrong debate
While the industry likes to debate whether e-commerce is dead, Kliger believes they are asking the wrong question. “It’s like when people say no airline makes money, therefore no consumer wants to fly. No. There is immense consumer demand for digital luxury, immense.”
The issue, he argued, is not the channel but the way it has been managed. “The fact that a lot of players have not been able to make money is a question of approach, strategy, and execution. We are digital, but we are retail.”
LuxExperience’s journey illustrates the complexity. Beyond integrating teams and cultures, they’re rebuilding their entire technical foundation by consolidating Net-a-Porter and Mr Porter onto shared infrastructure to address cost and efficiency problems across their full technology stack.
“Even with the right infrastructure and cultures, consumer expectations have only grown more demanding.”
Fostering different brand cultures
Technology was only part of the story. Cultural identity mattered just as much, and here Kliger took a different stance. “I want us to avoid becoming one culture. I want to have a Mytheresa culture in the Mytheresa team, and I want to have a Net-a-Porter culture. So, the challenge is not to mix, the challenge is to strengthen the good things about the different cultures.”
Even with the right infrastructure and cultures, consumer expectations have only grown more demanding. “What the customer called quick delivery 10 years ago is not the same thing as what they call quick delivery today,” said Kliger. “A customer checking out says, Okay, I checked out. Where’s my parcel? What do you mean? You checked out 10 minutes ago? Yeah, but now I expect delivery.”
And the costs of attracting those customers are steep. “Anyone running digital knows this is a big part of the costs of your operations. It’s the Google, Baidu, or WeChat rent you pay. It can be 10 or 15% depending on the business model. So it’s huge.” The key, he suggested, is not to avoid these costs but to ensure that retention offsets them, turning the focus from transactional marketing to Lifetime Value (LTV).
If surviving in luxury e-commerce is brutally difficult, how has LuxExperience succeeded? Kliger believes it comes down to five key lessons.
Keep it simple
To him, the answer lies in relentless execution, anchored in a few clear principles. At the heart of LuxExperience’s strategy is simplicity. “Simple is not easy. In some languages, simple is translated as easy. It’s actually very difficult to be and remain simple. You always need to bring it back. What does the customer want? And you need to focus on that.”
That philosophy extends from strategy – “the most important part of strategy is you need to know what you don’t want to do” – to digital design. Customers praise LuxExperience’s platforms for speed and ease of use, with one client noting they can complete a transaction in the time it takes for a traffic light to change from red to green.
Execution, in his eyes, is less about grand reinventions than about relentless daily progress. “Every day, get better… if you improve every day, after a year you have done a huge jump,” he explained. That incremental discipline, rather than big strategy shifts, is what creates resilience.
Build loyalty, not discount dependency
LuxExperience focuses on cultivating high-value customers rather than chasing short-term volume. The customer drop-off rate is around 75% after one year, but the remaining 25% deliver close to 100% revenue retention year over year, he said.
The goal is to invest in the right customers. “Once you have identified that 25%, this is where you need to work on retention. This is where you need to work on repurchase. This is where the LTV comes in.”
This discipline also explains his refusal to discount aggressively – a strategy that undermined the profitability and brand equity of many rivals. “If you attract a customer because you give a discount on a sneaker, it’s not a good customer. We know, we have done this analysis,” he said.
Curate experiences, not just products
While digital convenience is important, it must be complemented by physical engagement. “Nine out of ten moments are digital or WhatsApps or Messenger, but one out of 10, we try to be personal,” said Kliger. “We try to take them to a special place… Visit the archives of Valentino, visit the Atelier of Berluti in Paris. These are the things we organize.”
What is important is that these experiences must offer something that money can’t buy alone. “If I tell a top customer, hey, we’re organizing a dinner at the Ritz, they say, thank you very much, but I don’t need Mytheresa or Net-a-Porter to eat at the Ritz. I do it myself,” he explained. “But if I say, Look, you can meet the designer and hear stories and meet other customers, that’s where it’s exciting.”
Events also serve a strategic role in customer acquisition. In recent years, Mytheresa has organized pop-up stores in the Hamptons and Aspen. “Out of 3,000 visitors, if you turn 1,000 into customers, and you are in the Hamptons, you actually have a good quality cohort,” said Kliger.
The lesson, he added, is clear: “This additional layer, I believe, will become more and more important, because if you acquire customers through these, the quality is much better, much, much better than the acquisitions through digital.”
For Kliger, sustainability is not about technical jargon but about reassurance.
Provide peace of mind on sustainability
For Kliger, sustainability is not about technical jargon but about reassurance. “Our customers are not scientists. Our customers are not technicians. The best way one of my customers once expressed it was: ‘Look, I love luxury. I shop a lot. I want to feel good about what I do. I want to feel that I bought the right piece. I want to feel that I was not taken advantage of in price. But I also want to feel that by doing this, I’m not destroying the future of my children.’”
With transportation, LuxExperience’s biggest footprint, it has signed DHL’s biggest alternative fuel partnership, utilizing plane engines that can run on up to 35% recycled or green kerosene, though 70% remains carbon-based.
Lead with passion and craft
Finally, Kliger believes leadership in this industry is not about credentials but passion and expertise. “Our CTO doesn’t code himself, but he knows about it. Our chief operating officer doesn’t build warehouses, but he knows because he did in the past.”
In his words: “No master in shoemaking is not able to make shoes himself. No master in clothes is not able to do it themselves. In some ways, we lost this. Sometimes you meet managers who say: ‘I’m good at management.’ But are you good at the craft itself? You may not do it anymore, but you still need to know it.”
For luxury leaders, the message is unmistakable.
The lesson for luxury leaders
The conversation makes one thing clear: luxury e-commerce is evolving. Success depends less on the business model than on relentless execution, customer intimacy, and the ability to curate both digital and physical experiences.
“This is not brand strategy, brand concepts. Every lost customer I lose is a problem. Every customer I win is a win. You need to approach it with this mindset.”
For luxury leaders, the message is unmistakable. The future will be won by those who master the daily discipline of execution, blending technology, culture, and passion into experiences customers truly value.
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