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Cartier, Piaget, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre join Alibaba’s Tmall, following LVMH with virtual stores for online customers – how much would you spend on a luxury watch you’d never seen?

One feature of Hublot’s digital extension to its Fifth Avenue, New York, store is the chance to interact remotely with in-store salespeople. Photo: Hublot
One feature of Hublot’s digital extension to its Fifth Avenue, New York, store is the chance to interact remotely with in-store salespeople. Photo: Hublot
Timepieces

Watch brands Patek Philippe and Roger Dubuis try out augmented reality headsets and others add virtual assistants to deepen engagement with demanding customers, while some holdouts, including Rolex, insist technology is not immersive enough yet

When the world shut down early this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it seemed like trips to the local watch retailers – and indeed almost any shops – would be impossible. But were they?

Products from the Richemont maisons, such as Cartier and Jaeger-LeCoultre, were already available on various e-commerce platforms. In 2019, Richemont and Alibaba Group formed a strategic partnership with the opening of the Net-a-Porter flagship store on Alibaba’s Tmall Luxury Pavilion. The joint venture put all Richemont-owned watch brands including Cartier, Baume & Mercier, IWC Schaffhausen, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Panerai, Piaget, Roger Dubuis as well as Vacheron Constantin and Montblanc, at the finger tips of affluent Chinese consumers.
A Cartier watch available on Net-a-Porter, an early online retail platform for luxury brands. Photo: Cartier
A Cartier watch available on Net-a-Porter, an early online retail platform for luxury brands. Photo: Cartier
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Retailers are now taking the experiences offered by their platforms to the next level. In early May, IWC launched its first virtual reality boutique, featuring its Singapore store, enabling an immersive experience with the brand while sitting in the comfort of your own home.

“At a time when virtual connections are more frequent and accessible than physical ones, visitors can now enjoy an IWC experience outside the traditional retail infrastructure,” says Stanislas Rambaud, managing director for IWC Southeast Asia.

IWC’s foray into virtual reality was soon followed by sister brand Piaget, who launched a similar virtual boutique experience just a few weeks later. In both instances, the boutiques use vivid three-dimensional depictions of real-life IWC or Piaget stores, with different areas of the store playing host to watch or jewellery collections from the two brands. The private corner of the IWC virtual boutique contains the year’s Portugieser watch novelties, for instance, while the main atrium of the Piaget virtual store plays host to the Sunlight high jewellery collection.

Virtually the same – visiting a store within a store, illustrating how quickly luxury brands have pivoted to embrace the realities of a post-pandemic world. Photo: IWC
Virtually the same – visiting a store within a store, illustrating how quickly luxury brands have pivoted to embrace the realities of a post-pandemic world. Photo: IWC

Guests are able to explore the store on their own, engage with a programmed chatbot, or book a private virtual appointment with a brand representative who will take them on a tailored journey through the space. This ability to connect with a person is part of what distinguishes these virtual boutiques from other brand websites or e-commerce platforms.

Of course, this is not the watch world’s first foray into recreating a virtual retail experience for its customers. In 2018, LMVH-owned Hublot launched a new digital technology platform for its Fifth Avenue boutique in New York City that allows buyers to communicate with the brand’s salespeople without physically being in the boutique. According to the brand, the digital experience is virtually identical to an in-person visit to the store – except, perhaps, for the risk of contagion in pandemic times.