Scrolling down the catwalk

Prices in yuan, size conversion, cash-on-delivery service and various local payment systems, such as Alipay, are tailored for the Chinese market.

However, there is a concern over the shortage of locally available professionals who have both IT and fashion industry experience.

"This is our biggest challenge, but it's not only in China," he says.

Yoox Group's net revenue for the first half of this year was 172.9 million euros ($220.4 million), an increase of 31.7 percent compared with the corresponding period last year. It also recorded a monthly average of 12.5 million visitors to its store websites in the first half of this year, up from 9.2 million for the corresponding period last year.

Currently, Yoox's biggest markets are the US, Italy, the rest of Europe and Japan in terms of net revenue.

The other markets had the highest growth, almost tripling net revenue to 6.1 million euros in the first half of this year compared with the corresponding period last year - and China represents most of the trade in the other markets, Marchetti says.

But Yoox does not want to be seen growing its market share through offering quick and easy bargains on haute couture and exclusive fashion accessories.

Marchetti still remembers the sentence he wrote on the first page of his business plan for the company in 1997 about its mission: "Yoox is the noble e-commerce partner for leading fashion brands."

"We want to protect brands, and the online store is complementary to the physical store nowadays," he says.

"For our partners in the luxury sector, China was becoming a more important market. Since we are their partners, we need to be here to help them."

Last year, after setting up several mono-brand online stores in China for the established big-name labels, Yoox launched a multi-brand luxury boutique, thecorner.com.cn concentrating on smaller and less-known designers, including Haider Ackermann and Alexander Wang.

In recent years Marchetti has seen a change in the market, with customers becoming more sophisticated, and beginning to favor independent designers over the big brands.

"We thought that Chinese consumers might buy some different styles when everyone was saying that they would only buy power brands," he says. "But it's been a good thing for us, and it means our strategy begins to work."

In contrast to the thecorner.com.cn and single-brand online stores, where the collections are fully priced, Marchetti says yoox.cn offers merchandise at 50 percent discount at least.

"Consumers can get a very good price, which is the big difference from what we have been doing in the past two years where everything was full price," he says.

But rather than being a bargain basement attraction, the cachet, he believes, still applies in that customers can get premium goods and designer brands from Europe and the US that are very difficult to find elsewhere in China, online or in physical stores.

yaojing@chinadaily.com.cn