Net-A-Porter

[Foxie-Pooh]

Any new promo codes? any help is appreciated

 

[cavanaugh]

they got some great stuff in today

 

[Beautiful Stranger]

they really did, especially this dress which is one of the most beautiful ones i've ever senn:

net-a-porter

 

[leyla m.]

this dress^ is designed by a dear friend and a great designer.
the actual pattern has been made for him and is done by one of the biggest artist in the world. master FARSCHCHIAN.

it is truly a work of art and i recommend anyone to get it.
amr even got louboutin to do a special shoe for him in this print....... TDF!

 

[Beautiful Stranger]

oh, i didn't know leyla! I was almost tempted to get it, but donnot have 2,400 $ sparecash + i have no wear to wear a kaftandress..

It sold out pretty fast it seemed though, is it still on the site?

 

[leyla m.]

nope sold out
but i guess good for him... as i already have one ordered

i found the update to be quite weak this time

 

[Beautiful Stranger]

I actually really liked the update, many gorgeous dresses..

You ordered the dress? I'm so glad for you, i really love it. Take lots of pictures of you in it!! So, you paid full price or did you get a discount ? (not that's it any of my business)

 

[leyla m.]

^^ i didnt buy it off NAP of course... i have my own source... amr himself

 

[Beautiful Stranger]

Lucky girl

 

[sweet_n_simple]

So sexy

Just Cavalli
Full length satin dress

http://www.net-a-porter.com/product/21274

 

[Nymf]

is there a free shipping code anyone knows of?*bats eyelashes*

 

[dsq]

a good article from timesonline.co.uk about net-a-porter and its founder.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article1719261.ece

April 29, 2007
Queen of internet shopping

Natalie Massenet has confounded the online sceptics with her company Net-a-porter. Hailed as the first truly global luxury fashion retailer, it wants to stay independent – but the big firms are circling

The Andrew Davidson Interview

AT last I have a well-dressed fan. “Oh, I loved your book on entrepreneurs,” purrs Natalie Massenet. “I used to read bits in bed to my husband and say ‘look, that’s us’. It’s so great to meet you.”

Massenet, 41, elegant founder of the Net-a-porter.com shopping website, positively beams with admiration and goodwill. That, you swiftly discover, is her default mode. In a fashion world notorious for its bitchy backbiting, she is determined to be – in her own words – both ambitious and nice. “It’s our mission statement here,” she says. And I think she means it.

It has certainly worked for her so far. Her business – set up seven years ago as a designer womenswear etailer – is doubling in size each year and claims to be the world’s first truly global luxury fashion retailer.

Though hardly huge – £37m sales, 290 employees in London and New York – its clever mix of online editorial and expensive items to buy has got a lot of people interested. Two years ago it moved into profit and since then Massenet, a former fashion stylist, has reportedly turned down many millions of pounds in offers for the firm. It is now one of the fastest-growing private companies in Britain – ranked No 42 in the recent Sunday Times Fast Track 100.

Offers from whom? Luxury-goods groups, big retailers, other etailers, venture capitalists? “All of the above,” she grins. “I can’t reveal names. We have been approached by a lot of people, but we are on such a high growth trajectory that . . .”

She pouts. Los Angeles-born but brought up partly in Paris, Massenet mixes Anglo-Saxon drive and Gallic style to powerful effect. Dark and slim, she has an American accent and an elfin beauty, and it all helps, especially when her business’s success depends on a global view of what makes women look good each season.

Perhaps most remarkably, her vision for Net-a-porter – part-magazine, part shopping site – has been realised without treading on the toes of those vested interests that dominate the fashion industry, from global luxury brands with their own retail outlets to media owners who might see her as a rival.

Quite the reverse. Many have actively promoted Net-a-porter, and Net-a-porter promotes them back, sticking to recommended retail prices and liberally quoting the fashion media. From the outside, it looks like a big group hug.

Massenet wrinkles her nose. “We are about an edited choice and we want to be a trusted partner,” she says. “And since day one we have probably been the first online experience for many big fashion brands.”
On Net-a-porter, those brands include high-end names like Chloe, Jimmy Choo and Marc Jacobs as well as a clutch of up-and-coming designers that Massenet champions.

Items are swiftly delivered in swanky black packaging. Returns are just as swiftly processed. The growing realisation that this efficiency has ensnared a global clique of wealthy consumers – “the hedge-fund guys’ wives”, as one associate jokes – means that Massenet, married to a hedge-fund manager herself, has been swiftly elevated to front-row status at catwalk shows.

“We have 100,000 active customers,” says Massenet, sitting in Net-a-porter’s offices above Whiteleys shopping centre in west London. “And 1m unique users read the content two or three times a month. That’s up from 500,000 last September.”

And let’s not forget the husbands and boyfriends who get e-mails from the firm. “We call it the ‘Tell Santa’ service,” laughs Massenet. “You click on the dress or shoes you want, and we e-mail your husband saying we know she wants this. And you know,” she adds mischievously, “buying your wife patent leather Christian Louboutin shoes will get you enormous doses of appreciation.”

She laughs flirtatiously and suddenly the meeting room feels warm. Old friends say you shouldn’t underestimate Massenet’s power to persuade. “Natalie’s very driven, very focused, extremely hard-working, with real determination to make her business work,” says Jo Allison, PR director at Chanel UK.

That persuasiveness, and her long-stand-ing contacts in the industry, helped get the designers on board to launch Net-a-porter. But the key to the site’s success, says its users, is that Massenet’s team takes the struggle out of choosing what’s hot, and what’s not.

They also know how to present the clothes attractively on a web page. “What people miss is that it takes journalistic discipline as well as a buyer’s eye,” says Tyler Brulé, editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine and founder of Wallpaper. “People who come from bricks-and-mortar businesses haven’t been so successful.”

Massenet has presentation in the genes. Her mother was a British-born Chanel model, her father an American journalist-turned-movie publicist. Born Natalie Rooney – she uses her husband’s surname – she was brought up an only child in Paris, then at 11 followed her father back to Los Angeles when her parents split up. Like many only children from broken homes, she became adept at building relationships to compensate – “I have sisters who are amazing women friends” – and at recreating the bonds she missed. Massenet frequently refers to her workforce as her family.

After college, she worked for the movie producer John Hughes, then at Women’s Wear Daily in New York and Tatler in London before growing disenchanted with the cutthroat environment of magazine journalism. She had noted, however, that there was a “disconnect” between people seeing the latest designs in glossies and finding them in the stores. “We’d get calls saying we can’t get them. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a link between impulse and getting it delivered to your door?”

But running the business after launch was something of a high-wire act. She told a magazine last year that she started with a group of friends who have now left. “Mixing friendship with work was a painful lesson.” She won’t talk about it now – that group-hug vibe is too strong, perhaps, to dwell on any difficulties.

And since getting its initial stock on sale-or-return, Net-a-porter has had to buy goods in advance – a capital-intensive process that meant Massenet had to refinance the firm with new backing every year until it became profitable.

So far it has worked but it has left her with just a 17% stake. “Friends, family and management” hold another 15%, with two other significant investors holding 28% each – Bay-winds, a Venezuelan firm, and Richemont, the owner of Cartier, Dunhill and Montblanc. About 40 private backers make up the rest.

And no plans for a float yet? No, she smiles. She can finance all the expansion she needs. And as her French husband works for hedge-fund firm Gottex, we can presume she gets good advice.
Last year that expansion included a new depot outside New York so Net-a-porter could guarantee same-day delivery in Man-hattan. Another depot in the Far East should follow. Massenet wants more editorial product, too, including a quarterly diary-style magazine sent to regular buyers, and more technology: films and videos.

Beyond that, she is cagey. Will she start taking advertising? “We’re considering all kinds of things,” she says.
Will she launch other shopping sites? “We’ve registered Petit-a-porter.com and Net-a-beaute.com.”

And a men’s fashion site? No, she says. She has enough to do selling to women.

But the competition is hotting up and others think she will soon be made an offer she can’t refuse – if not by Richemont, then by Gucci-owner PPR, Louis Vuitton’s LVMH or an American store group such as Barneys.
But what kind of price do you put on a profitable dotcom like Net-a-porter? £10m? £100m? “That’s a bit low,” she says, flashing another Audrey Hepburn smile. “After all, we have a relationship with the best demographic of female consumers available online.”

So she has thought about it? “There’s always a price but in terms of what it needs to become and deliver, we have only just started.”
Should we mention the fact she has also had two babies since launching the busi-ness? No, enough. She copes by prioritising, she says, and by being an optimist.

“My Dad raised me with the belief never to be afraid of what’s on the other side of the mountain.” She pauses and adds that her father, now dead, is her “publicist in the sky”. Looking down, he must be pretty pleased.

NATALIE MASSENET’S WORKING DAY
THE Net-a-porter founder wakes at her home in Notting Hill at 7am. “Or earlier if my 14-month-old daughter Ava has anything to do with it,” says Natalie Massenet. She breakfasts with Ava and older daughter Isabella and husband Arnaud, “listening to annoying French news radio”.
After dropping the children at school, she is at her desk in Net-a-porter’s open-plan office above Whiteleys in Bayswater by 9am. “I check daily sales, and the biggest sellers, then there is a barrage of calls and meetings.” She lunches at her desk and works until 7pm. “I do as little socialising as possible in the evening so I can see the children before bed.”

VITAL STATISTICS
Born:May 13, 1965
Marital status:married, with two children
School:St Bernard high school, Playa del Rey, Los Angeles
University:UCLA
First job:selling men’s clothes in the Beverly Center, Los Angeles
Salary package:undisclosed
Homes:Notting Hill and Paris
Car:black LPG Smart Car
Favourite book:The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald
Favourite music:Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith
Favourite film:When Harry Met Sally
Favourite gadget:Apple Macbook Pro
Last holiday:Greece

DOWNTIME
“MY best form of relaxation is obsessively looking for country houses on Primelocation.com,” says Natalie Massenet. “I know every house for sale in Wiltshire and Somerset. In fact, if there’s anyone out there . . .” She also reads the property glossies: Elle Decor, House & Garden, World of Interiors. “It’s my sanctuary, my escape and my p*rn.”
Otherwise she likes entertaining at home with friends, and shopping online, and watching American Idol and X Factor on television. “I love shows where people win things and biographies where people become successful. It’s a big running theme in my life.”

 

[Meg]

I can't help but find people like her a bit annoying. Or at least how they are always presented in articles as being sleek and slender, being born in Paris but raised in the UK, or born in the US and schooled in Switzerland and have a commanding presence with a few chum's quotes tossed in for good measure 'she's always been driven' 'she just has this presence about her' it turns me off. Regardless i'm kind of surprised their offices are above whiteley's! I always imagined their offices would be super chic, and maybe they are but that area of bayswater to me isn't.

 

[justlooking]

That was really interesting, thanks dsq

 

[justlooking]

I can't help but find people like her a bit annoying. Or at least how they are always presented in articles as being sleek and slender, being born in Paris but raised in the UK, or born in the US and schooled in Switzerland and have a commanding presence with a few chum's quotes tossed in for good measure 'she's always been driven' 'she just has this presence about her' it turns me off. Regardless i'm kind of surprised their offices are above whiteley's! I always imagined their offices would be super chic, and maybe they are but that area of bayswater to me isn't.

I agree! this is how it always works and it can get annoying sometimes! I don't blame her though- it seems to be a writing style (although obviously there would be some agreement about the direction of the piece). Whenever someone goes from ordinary to achieving something they have adjectives thrown around everywhere- always beautiful, charismatic, charming, a presence etc etc.

 

[leyla m.]

I can't help but find people like her a bit annoying. Or at least how they are always presented in articles as being sleek and slender, being born in Paris but raised in the UK, or born in the US and schooled in Switzerland and have a commanding presence with a few chum's quotes tossed in for good measure 'she's always been driven' 'she just has this presence about her' it turns me off. Regardless i'm kind of surprised their offices are above whiteley's! I always imagined their offices would be super chic, and maybe they are but that area of bayswater to me isn't.

no comment, youd be surprised once you find out who browses this forum (which is why i wont comment but you can think how i feel about what you said )

 

[stilettogirl84]

I can't help but find people like her a bit annoying. Or at least how they are always presented in articles as being sleek and slender, being born in Paris but raised in the UK, or born in the US and schooled in Switzerland and have a commanding presence with a few chum's quotes tossed in for good measure 'she's always been driven' 'she just has this presence about her' it turns me off.

what's wrong with her having been born in one nation and raised in another?

or what's wrong with her being slender

or sucessful?

 

[Meg]

None of those things. I was born in one country and went to school and lived in another country. The point isn't those attributes it's how they are constantly presented in these articles and the lives they lead. And they all seem to have the exact same glamorized attributes.

 

[stilettogirl84]

I don't notice tons of articles glamorising living in one country but being raised in another.

I see articles rticles glamorizing being rich, succesful in business, and attractive- but I see those as being something worth admiring or aspiring to.

anyway it's not her fault how the journalists portray her

 

[Meg]

If you want to misconstrue my post fine. It was meant in a light hearted manner and i disagree with the things you say above but there's no point going off topic to quibble when we both have different perspectives.