Flavien d’Audiffret

At first, we intended to satisfy our customers who often look for high-end and prestige brands on Amazon.fr. So it is in a spirit of differentiation from the other Amazon shops that we decided to create Beauté Prestige,” explains Flavien d’Audiffret, Manager of the Beauté and Beauté Prestige shops on Amazon.fr.

Right now, a thousand products and 40 brands, including 18 from France, are available online. Most of them are niche and/or very high-end brands rather than the usual big names of the selective channel: Parfum d’Orsay, Miller Harris, L’Artisan Parfumeur, Heeley, Frapin, or Erno Laszlo, Codage, and Argentum in skincare, and David Mallett and Massato in hair care. “We wanted to build a sales showcase of local brands to differentiate ourselves”, specifies Flavien d’Audiffret.

An unexpected showcase for a segment on a roll

While Euromonitor foresees a 3.3 billion dollar increase for luxury perfumes by 2018, and Harrods is inaugurating its prestige Salon de Parfums, Amazon aims at defending a voluntarist vision: making prestige products which are not widely distributed available to the largest number of people possible, with good service quality and delivery in one day. “We are proud to be able to make these brands more accessible, as they are distributed in a very selective way, and some of them are hardly or not present in France, like Rouge Bunny Rouge”. Each of them remains in its own world. “We endeavour to recreate the brand’s environment, its design and history, a description of its products, and to offer its whole range. It is not Amazon’s marketing strategy that prevails, but that of the brands we reproduce as best we can,” Flavien d’Audiffret declares.

The initiative is under close scrutiny by independent distribution channels, as it conveys the American giant’s clear determination to get the first rank in online beauty. “This sector grows at a 30% rate per year on the Internet, and although our traditional categories (books, DVDs…) are still significant, Beauty is definitely emerging on Amazon. Our ambition is to become the online leader on this market, as is already the case in the United States”, asserts Flavien d’Audiffret, who promises to widen the brand selection over the next few months.

As the first month has come to an end, the assessment is mostly based on the feedback from brands. Amazon affirms their partners are greatly satisfied and directly committed and associated with the future website developments.

As they are limited by a narrow channel of independent perfumeries, these brands see in this new network a growth opportunity that is hard not to seize given the difficulty to solve the equation of economic profitability. However, not all comments were positive, as some brands consider the image of Amazon does not correspond to their positioning.

Discovering and testing, just like in stores

Now Amazon still has to talk consumers into ordering products they do not or hardly know. “New customers who did not use to buy anything on Amazon are now led to visit our online store due to the buzz, which is really satisfactory,” notes Flavien d’Audiffret. Web users are guided by several functionalities and tips from beauty editors to make a choice, but for them to make a real discovery there is now a ten-product box available in both sales and miniature formats, and Amazon offers it for orders of 60 euros or more. This selection from the cosmetics and perfume brands present on the Beauté Prestige Amazon e-shop will be available until out of stock.