A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Is there also a special category of boutiques or designers? I have a very good friend whom I hired out of Bergdorf Goodman in 1999 to be my VP of Merchandising – Bruce Pask. His partner is Donald Dean who’s a couture designer. He has a ready-to-wear line, but he’s also very much a custom designer.

What category of designers do you work with? Where do you get these designers? I found great small designers when I traveled. Is that something that can be accessed?

Rafael Ortiz: I’m going to give you a qualified yes. My fundamental belief was that if you want to earn trust from this kind of a shopper, it’s better to not be a retailer. It’s better to focus on helping her acquire whatever it is wherever that is. It’s an advisory role. The way we deliver the service is, we want to be able to access any luxury good item that is correct for that client. The way we do that is we aggregate data feeds from all the notable e-tailers. That gives us a pretty big selection.

The hard part is accessing the product that’s not online. We try to do that when our client is looking for something very unique. Examples of that are, we have clients who go to the Met Gala. That’s about identifying a very specific designer, sourcing it, connecting them, and making that special thing happen. We don’t do that every often, but we do that when it’s warranted.

You’re right. There are still a tremendous number of small but amazing designers that are almost completely offline. They’re still not participating online. This luxury category has a ways to unfold.

Sramana Mitra: Long way to go. What you’re doing with hundreds of customers right now, even if you don’t go to millions of customers, you can build a very interesting business.

Rafael Ortiz: I agree. It’s just so great that there are designers who are just now thinking about what it means to go online. It’s like going back to 1999 and 2000.

Sramana Mitra: Uniqueness is, by definition, something that is not highly replicated. Those who look for uniqueness look for that.

Rafael Ortiz: That’s what makes this category magical.

Sramana Mitra: How far along are you revenue-wise?

Rafael Ortiz: We didn’t deploy our app until 2018. We acquired Editorialist in 2019. The business, as it is today, did not deploy until late 2019. The pandemic was a challenge for everyone, but we kicked into gear during the pandemic. Last year in 2021, we grew about 150%. We’ll probably do something like that every year.

Sramana Mitra: Are we talking in the $10 million range?

Rafael Ortiz: We’ll still be under that this year. Next year, we’ll go past that.

Sramana Mitra: I enjoyed listening to you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz
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