Organisational and marketing challenges in designing and implementing an omnichannel strategy for luxury fashion brands

The adoption of omnichannel strategies by luxury fashion brands has a relevant impact on the whole value chain and generates many critical organisational implications for luxury companies. Several fashion brands' reluctance to adopt omnichannel initiatives might be related to the uniqueness of the luxury fashion value proposition, strongly associated with rich storytelling and memorable experiences and the need of large organisational redesign involving collection design, physical retail role and functions, service design and inventory and supply chain management. At present, there is no common approach to such topics within luxury fashion companies but it is possible to draw a sort of “ominchannel adoption curve or life cycle”, with the different evolutionary stages in which companies might find themselves. These different stages are characterised by different goals for omnichannel, different levels of integration between digital and traditional retail, information generation and sharing, and function goals and competencies.