Saks Live Sales Look to Fashion’s Past to Secure Its Future With Live Commerce

Live commerce wasn’t an invention of the digital era or a pandemic-era lifeline for retailers and consumers. In fashion, it’s always been a means of seeing the product first and ensuring you get what you want. Since Covid-19 arrived, much of the story of live commerce has centered around China’s embrace of livestreamed sales and the billions of dollars they rake in. According to McKinsey, proceeds from live sales in China grew from $67 billion in pre-pandemic 2019 to an estimated $423 billion last year. While there’s been limited success in the U.S. from retailers like streetwear site NTWRK, the Walmart-favored TalkShopLive and Amazon Live, both Instagram and Facebook shut down their attempts at live shopping within the last year. But live sales have been stitched into the fabric of fashion culture since the House of Worth held its first runway shows for French royal courts in the mid-1800s. For much of the 20th Century, fashion shows were hushed affairs for small guest lists or privately modeled showcases of a designer’s work. Even today, designers’ and retailers’ private events offer exclusive buyers an experience and opportunity that keeps them coming back. Is TikTok the Latest Social Platform to Try Live Shopping in the US? In February 2021, premium retailer Saks launched its Saks Live as a means of coping with the pandemic by providing customers with an alternative to the 4,000 live events its 40 stores typically host annually. During the two years that followed, Saks and its partners at Swedish live video shopping platform Bambuser tinkered with their formula, staged invitingly lavish environments (lofts, hotel suites, magazine offices) and invited guests from Elton John and Donatella Versace to dermatologists and stylists to sell every item that appeared on screen. Live commerce has reinforced a connection between Saks and its most loyal customers by combining the exclusive feel of a 20th Century private sale with the ease of 21st Century ecommerce. With Saks customers leaving Saks Live events with carts twice as full as the average online shopper, it and Bambuser found the comfort zone of an audience that may otherwise have spent a decade crawling toward this advance in online retail. “Luxury has a real heritage in these very intimate, very interactive experiences that get you really close to the fabulous things that we’re selling, the beautiful construction, the high quality,” said Saks CMO Emily Essner. Setting the stage Sophie Abrahamsson spent more than a decade in retail before leaving her last position with H&M to join Bambuser just as it launched live video shopping in 2019. She and her colleagues wanted a better understanding of the modern shopper and used both inputs from retailers and data from the site to determine their expectations. Using data culled from its video player, Bambuser can see when shoppers enter, how long they stay, how many chat messages they're sending, how many items they’ve liked and when they’ve added something to the cart. They can then compare all of that with data from brands in similar industries and tell a partner what makes that customer stay. But while they can see which hosts shoppers like and moderate the chat to make visitors feel safe, they require a brand partner to offer the elements and experience that brings them to a live event in the first place. Live video shopping platform Bambuser pairs its player with Saks' fonts, design and other elements to mirror a Saks in-store experience. Saks took Bambuser’s white-label platform and applied its fonts, colors, elegant white space and point of view—portrait videos for one-on-one live shopping sessions, sweeping landscapes for runway shows and panel discussions. “At work we’re on Zoom, privately we FaceTime, when you're on your free time you're watching stories on TikTok: Everything that you're kind of consuming online is in video,” Abrahamsson said. “We just wanted to make sure that the Saks experience online was mirroring that behavior while keeping to the Saks identity.” Getting to know you According to Coresight Research, the percentage of U.S. consumers who watched a shoppable livestream rose from 32% in February 2022 to 54% last September. Of those viewers, 39% had purchased something via livestream during the past three months. According to Abrahamsson, Bambuser has seen 200% year-over-year growth in consumer adoption and has learned a bit about live shoppers along the way. If a consumer is at a live event, they’ve come to shop and tend to add twice as much to their bag as a retailer’s typical ecommerce customer. While Hubspot puts the average website dwell time between two and four minutes, visitors to a live commerce show stay for an average of nine minutes. Twitch Brings Back POG Picks Live Shopping Event in US, Extends It to More Markets When Saks Live hosted the unveiling of the holiday window displays at the flagship New York store on Fifth Avenue last year—featuring a performance from Elton John—the event drew 400,000 customers and led to 4 million organic social media impressions. More recently, Saks Live featured content creator Tezza Barton showcasing mountain gear in Aspen and the launch of designer Adam Lippes’ spring line. Saks learned that while its Saks Live customers enjoy shopping at the events—and increase their average orders from a typical ecommerce visit—they’re driven more by their commitment to the brand. “While they may purchase the items that were featured in the Saks Live, in general there's less of a one-to-one correlation,” Saks’ Essner said. Bespoke via broadband Large-scale live commerce has taken myriad forms throughout the generations. To some U.S. consumers, it still means QVC or the Home Shopping Network. In China, nearly 500 million consumers shop on livestreaming services like Alibaba’s Taobao Live. Bambuser entered live commerce by targeting luxury brands like Italy’s Luisaviaroma, online retailer Moda Operandi and opulent conglomerate LVMH. Traditionally, Abrahamsson said, those brands’ consumers can spend 10 to 15 days researching a product before buying it. When they’re in a live buying session with an expert who can answer their questions, that decision is made much more quickly. “The reason why we went after the premium consumer is that they are used to very white glove treatment in physical retail,” Abrahamsson said. “That treatment is really hard to replicate on a static ecommerce page, but ... you're giving them the in-store experience online.” From Lady Gaga and Bud Light to Tiffany’s, Brands Show Live Video Attracts a Crowd Though it may lack the polish of an ad or a campaign, Saks Live uses its format and rotating cast of experts to listen to shoppers’ questions and requests. It took a medium that Saks initially used to talk about the best Zoom tops or compelling home office layouts and transformed it into a platform that it can use for large-scale events with David Furnish and Ralph Lauren or more intimate gatherings for VIP clients. Change doesn’t always come easily or quickly when you’re 160 years old. But Saks digital future looks remarkably like a runway that it and its adherents have walked before. “The pandemic was a moment of incredible acceleration of comfort and interaction with digital features that would have taken us a decade or two to get to,” Essner said. “You had people who never would have engaged with a virtual event who—because there was no alternative—really did, and now that is something that they've done and something that they're comfortable with."