For your shopping session at Galeries Lafayette Haussmann… stay at home!

More than a hundred years after its opening in 1912, the emblematic Parisian department store on Boulevard Haussmann continues to evolve and adapt to its national and international clientele. The customer doesn’t want to or can’t move? It doesn’t matter! The point of sale and its most beautiful luxury and designer brands come directly to his home for an individualized shopping experience. As Alexandre Liot, Director of Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann, points out, the objective of this new service is clear: “to make the offer of our Boulevard Haussmann flagship accessible to as many people as possible, beyond its walls.”

To achieve this objective, Exclusive Live Shopping connects the customer to one of the advisors present under the dome of the department store via video. The experience begins on the brand’s website where the customer is invited to click on the banner under the menu bar. Three clicks later, he sees his personal shopper’s face appear on his screen.

The conversation begins. To preserve the client’s peace of mind, the camera is unidirectional and only the advisor is visible. The latter walks through the aisles of the department store and advises his interlocutor according to his tastes, his expectations, his budget or his morphology, while making him discover the latest brand news. He or she is spoilt for choice!

Indeed, some one hundred and twenty luxury and designer brands are accessible. Others, such as Bulgari, Chanel, Dior, Isabel Marant, Kenzo, Louis Vuitton, Off-White, Prada and Sisley, offer customers the opportunity to contact one of their own advisers directly. Available from Monday to Friday between 11:00 am and 7:00 pm and in several languages, Exclusive Live Shopping allows customers to prepare their wish list. Once they have made their choice, all they have to do is pay for their purchases remotely and choose between home delivery or collection from the department store’s Click & Collect service.

Naturally, the launch of Exclusive Live Shopper appears to be a response to the containment and closure of the 70,000 m2 of the Parisian department store. This is not the case! The project had been in the company’s boxes for several months. The Covid-19 pandemic has simply accelerated its implementation, as Alexandre Liot confirms: “The unprecedented crisis we have just gone through has pushed us to show extreme agility and creativity.”

Moreover, throughout its long history, the store has adapted to the evolution of the trade and the consumer. As the industrial revolution of Artificial Intelligence begins, retailers must integrate a new order. The customer now directs the relationship with the brand and no longer the other way around.

The brand must therefore constantly anticipate its demands and provide it with a whole range of solutions and services. Hence the launch of Galeries Lafayette – La Cagnotte, an online jackpot service dedicated to the gift world and boosted compared to competing offers by a 5% bonus if spent within partner chains. At the same time, the company has also integrated the image recognition solution of Israeli startup Syte into its website.

While these three services enrich the company’s all-round offer, they also show that faced with the emergence of Ambient Commerce, the new dominant form of commerce, companies must more than ever expand their range of tools. Why is this? So that customers can satisfy their desires while using the solution adapted to their current constraints. In three words, Innovez Service Centric!