Luxury doesn’t always have to be spending money. You can save tonnes of money and live the good life through flash sales. Yes, all the cool people including Serena in Gossip Girl are logging on to the website Gilt.com which offers everything from designer wear, to wine to air-tickets at heavily discounted prices. Think 60 per cent off the original price, and believe it or not there is no catch.
On a recent day on Gilt.com, shoppers could buy 10 round-trip tickets on Virgin America for $3,585, three sessions of laser hair removal for $352 o eight Alaskan king salmon fillets for $118.95. Designer-wear clothes from top brands can be yours for a fraction of their original price. That is a reflection of how Gilt Groupe, which made online flash sales of women’s clothes popular in the US, is trying to refashion itself as a high end Amazon.com a one stop shop for luxury goods.
Gilt was at the forefront of flash sale sites, which sell brands’ excess inventory at deep discounts for a limited period of times, an idea modelled at Vente-Privee.com in France. Most of these flash sites took off in 2009, when even wealthy people severely had slashed their spending. Apart from saving its clients huge sums of money, Gilt is also fattening its bank balance. It brought in $500 million in gross revenue last year. The company is just three years old.
Department stores are getting seriously worried now as more and more shoppers say that they shop less at traditional retailers because they shop more on flash-sale sites! Gilt attracted 946,000 visitors to its web site in June, just behind Bloomingdales.com which had 982,000 visitors.
(Compiled from IHT)
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