Mytheresa’s growing product mix, global reach

With over US$350 million in annual sales in 140 countries, Mytheresa is among the world’s largest luxury online retailers. The company’s 32-year evolution from a brick-and-mortar retailer in Munich, Germany has been extensively documented. Today, Mytheresa is navigating an increasingly competitive online landscape in the luxury sector, and its strategy deserves a close look.

A recent interview with company president and chief executive Michael Kliger, who was hired in 2015, the year after the Neiman Marcus Group bought Mytheresa, provides insightful answers. Kliger’s approach to running and growing the company is a study in simplicity and pragmatism.

The company’s focus long has been working with many prominent luxury brands such as Prada, Gucci, Chloé, and Balenciaga to feature a carefully edited selection of womenswear and accessories. That’s not changing.

“The main benefit we offer to our customer is the selection,” Kliger told the London-based Drapers, which has covered the fashion industry for more than a century. “You try to find the best brands and, within those brands, the most intriguing and luxurious pieces. The selection and the edit are the core element of what we try to do for our customers. We don’t believe in being a catalog for all products and all brands.”

To compete amid an increasingly crowded field of online retailers that aggregate products from luxury brands, Kliger is expanding Mytheresa’s target customer and target market. The company launched an edit of kidswear products in January and plans to do the same with menswear in January 2020. Mytheresa’s largest market has been Europe, but efforts are underway to ramp up sales in Asia, the U.S., and other parts of the world –- an obvious appeal to its partner brands.

Mytheresa has a technology focus as well. For example, what Drapers calls a mobile-first mindset has produced, in Kliger’s words, “the largest share of mobile sales in the luxury industry – more than 50% of sales are made on mobile and between 70%-80% of page views are made on a mobile device.”

Enhancing the online shopping experience through advanced technologies, of course, is Embodee’s focus. This explains why we like to work with luxury retailers such as Mytheresa for online product customization. Play the video above to see Mytheresa’s 3D-product-experience visualization of Gucci leather Ace sneakers as they’re customized using dynamically rendered images from Embodee.

Technology aside, Kliger told Drapers that “what fascinates me about retail is that, at the heart of it, it’s a simple business: offer the product that someone wants at the best price and sell it for more than it cost you.

“There are millions of decisions that need to be made. It is simple in concept, but the execution can be daunting – I like that.”