Did Saks just help Amazon crack the luxury code? 

Maybe.  

The internet’s everything store has been looking to break into high-end fashion for years, but it’s had only limited success outside of beauty, where it is now making headway in prestige. 

Now designer fashion is coming to the e-commerce giant in a much more substantial way with the launch of Saks on Amazon, a storefront on Amazon’s Luxury Stores platform. 

While Luxury Stores was introduced with much fanfare in 2020 — marking Amazon’s big push into high-end fashion — only a few top-tier brands, like Oscar de la Renta, joined up.

Saks is changing that now with its storefront, which will launch with looks from Dolce & Gabbana, Balmain, Etro, Stella McCartney, Giambattista Valli, Erdem, Fear of God, Jason Wu Collection, Rosetta Getty and Johanna Ortiz, as well as Chantecaille and La Prairie in skin care. 

Amazon had millions of searches for those brands last year, showing both the potential of the Amazon customer base and a breadth that can be scary in luxury, where a tight focus on a select few can be a powerful statement.

In the months ahead, more brands are set to launch on the Saks storefront, which will carry a selection of women’s and men’s ready-to-wear, beauty, shoes, handbags and accessories curated by Saks.

The storefront will be refreshed regularly and, at launch, will feature a series of shoppable digital “windows” to show off the product. Those windows will be replicated in the real world at Saks’ New York flagship on Fifth Avenue. The launch will also be hyped in a “Saks Arrives on Amazon” campaign created by Saks and directed by Emmy-award winning director Max Siedentopf. 

The campaign includes six vignettes that the companies said play up “unique, idiosyncratic moments of Saks luxury products arriving at home” — including Stella McCartney Ryder bags hanging from umbrellas and floating down from the sky. 

“Unique” and “idiosyncratic” could also apply to the pairing of Saks and Amazon. 

“At Amazon, we love these peculiar matchings and it actually has been an amazing partnership,” said Jenny Freshwater, who runs Amazon’s fashion business and is vice president of fashion and fitness.

“From our perspective, we are bringing the customer experience and the technology innovation that we’ve grown accustomed to at Amazon,” Freshwater said. “Saks is able to bring the brands and the selection and that luxury experience and the elevation. 

“While it might’ve seemed like an unusual pairing on paper, it has been a really interesting and wonderful partnership. And this is really just the beginning where we’re evolving, we always listen to customers. This is no different. We’ll get a lot of feedback and continue to evolve that experience alongside of Saks.”

Orders will be fulfilled by Saks, but customer service will be handled by Amazon’s Luxury Stores. Amazon will also handle returns. 

“We are constantly trying to increase our selection for our customer,” Freshwater said. “We know customers like breadth and depth and this is just another step toward that strategy.

“I had the opportunity to go to fashion weeks in Paris and Milan this cycle,” she said. “And as you talk to brands, I think it’s one of the things that is most exciting — it’s bringing that Amazon customer, the vast customer base, to luxury but also what we can do in terms of innovating in the luxury space to make experiences that are more shoppable and more delightful.”

While Saks is starting out on Amazon with a tight selection of designer brands, it remains to be seen how the storefront performs and changes. 

Emily Essner, Saks’ president and chief commercial officer, said: “I think only the consumer will tell us. We are just excited to get it out, get it out in the world and watch the customer engage and be able to evolve everything as we go.”

Certainly there are two willing parties in that evolution. Amazon is constantly tweaking its business model and taking big bets on new ideas while Saks is in the midst of a major transformation, integrating Neiman Marcus, an acquisition that Amazon helped pay for last year. 

Essner said between Saks’ luxury expertise and Amazon’s customer centricity and speed there was “something in that alchemy” that finally drew in luxury brands. 

“It was the time,” she said.

Designer brands have been watching Amazon closely and have shifted from saying they’d never sell on the mammoth platform to watching to see who will take the plunge first and how they fare. 

“In the end, our goal is to really work with like-minded brands where we really feel a symbiosis in terms of customers, in terms of fashion, where we can over the long term collectively grow our businesses,” Essner said. 

Where Saks brings relationships and an intimate understanding of fashion, she said, “Amazon brings an incredible customer centricity and incredible operational expertise, speed. And so we’re really excited to bring those things together and I think now is the time where we were really able to illustrate that value proposition to our brand partners.”

Fashion is watching.