Céline makes long-awaited move into e-commerce

LVMH-owned luxury house Céline has finally made its long-awaited move into e-commerce.

Having been one of the very last luxury houses to hold out from selling online, it has launched a new version of celine.com in its home market of France. The service is expected to be rolled out to the rest of Europe and to the US by spring of next year.

The new site sells a full range of Céline product from bags to shoes, sunglasses, jewellery and ready-to-wear and offers customers a number of delivery and return choices including click and collect/return in-store, as well as the opportunity to search for products across its boutiques.

A spokesperson for the brand told WWD: "E-commerce is launching as planned with ambitious business objectives, but also as a key tool to increase visibility, recruit new clients and provide a full service to our clients who are looking for a global experience, mixing digital and physical touchpoints."

Céline, which operates under the creative direction of British designer Phoebe Philo, has been famously reticent when it comes to digital but early this year it began to embrace social media with the launch of an Instagram account, which has so far amassed 641,000 followers.

For comparison British luxury house Burberry, where former Céline CEO Marco Gobbetti has just taken over the reins, has been a digital forerunner and has 10.4m followers on Instagram.

Céline was the last of LVMH's fashion houses to move into e-commerce, with Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Pucci, Nicholas Kirkwood, Berluti, Kenzo and Fendi all selling online. Earlier this year the group also opened a multibrand luxury website, to rival the likes of Net-A-Porter.com and Matchesfashion.com. Called 24 Sevres, the site serves as an online version of LVMH-owned Parisian department store Le Bon Marché.