Women’s luxury brand Tahari Arthur S. Levine waited a long time to sell directly to consumers, and when it launched its first e-commerce site it decided to offer its complete line of fashions, a breadth shoppers won’t find anywhere else.

Owners of the privately owned wholesaler two years ago started researching a direct channel to consumers as its retailer clients sold more merchandise online and consumer demand for online access increased, Judy Reiley, TahariASL’s e-commerce director, says. The TahariASL brand was born 15 years ago after a licensing deal between Arthur S. Levine and Elie Tahari.

“Not every retailer buys all of our products, so, for example, Macy’s Inc. (No. 7 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide) carries a certain selection, Nordstrom Inc. (No. 19) another and Lord & Taylor another. There may be some crossover or there may not,” she says. “We’re going to be a resource for our customers to find our entire product line, including all styles and sizes, in one place.”

Offering all of TahariASL products, which no single retailer does, is a key component of Tahariasl.com because younger consumers prefer going online and seeking products they want but cannot find in stores, says Les Schreiber, TahariASL’s chief operating officer and partner. Schreiber says the company focused initially on making private-label products for retailer customers to brand as their own—a business that has grown into a substantial portion of TahariASL’s revenues.

Then it turned its attention to building an online shop. “Once [the private-label division] was up and running, it took us a while to come up with a vendor we felt comfortable with” for the e-commerce site, Schreiber says. “I’d rather be a little late to the party and do it right. We took our time to launch (the website) properly and we’re very happy we did that.”

Many luxury brands once disdained online sales, but that view has changed as luxury retailers realize their customers increasingly shop online, often on smartphones, to research their next high-end purchase and to buy.  “There was an initial fear that digital technology was contrary to the exclusivity of luxury brands,” Ana Andjelic, senior vice president and global strategy director at Havas LuxHub, an agency that tracks luxury trends, told Internet Retailer in the fall.

Online sales, at 6% of the luxury market, are expected to climb to 18% of luxury sales by 2025, according to Nathalie Remy, a partner in McKinsey & Co.’s Paris office, and McKinsey’s research shows that 44% of luxury goods buyers research online before buying.

TahariASL has discovered since the website launch in February that its customers, at least those shopping online, are younger than the company had thought, including women buying an outfit for their first job out of college. As a result, the company will make more of certain garments and tweak some designs, such as shortening skirt lengths, Schreiber says.

Reiley, whom the company hired in July 2015 to direct the e-commerce launch, says the brand also plans online exclusives and expanded offerings. She did not disclose numbers, but says sales and site traffic have exceeded expectations. Tahari’s owners spent July 2014 to July 2015 vetting companies to set up the website before deciding on vendor WebLinc’s  platform. The company was impressed by WebLinc’s flexibility, including enabling responsive design, a format that adapts the look of a retail website to the device the consumer is using, and its ability to manage the launch and carry it off by the prescribed date, Reiley says.

Schreiber says TahariASL has hired a separate staff to work in a dedicated portion of its warehouse in Millburn, N.J., to fulfill e-commerce orders.

 A fashion industry consultant says TahariASL is among manufacturers increasingly required by retailers to warehouse their own merchandise, handle the inventory and ship orders to the retailers’ online shoppers, even while the retailers profit from those sales through the retailers’ web portals. At the same time, he says, retailers are devoting more store space to higher-margin private-label goods.

Andrew Jassin, managing director of Jassin Consulting Group, says it’s also difficult and complicated for manufacturers such as TahariASL to sell directly to consumers online because they must be able to pack orders of as little as one item, whereas they are accustomed to shipping much larger orders to department stores. The brands also must maintain inventory to fulfill online orders as they come in rather than set up inventory six months in advance as they do for retailer clients, Jassin says.

Favorite