Engineering Legitimacy by Iva Petkova

Author:Iva Petkova
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Executives at Digital Moda thought long and hard about the one key problem e-commerce might bring to fashion companies: the difficulty to convey what is exclusivity online. Unlike the brick-and-mortar fashion industry, where exclusivity was typically gauged by the distinctiveness of the retailer carrying the brand and the average value of a high-fashion item, determining exclusivity online was more complex. “What in the physical world is location”, the Head of Global Buying at Digital Moda explained, “in the online world is traffic, 4 and the type of traffic that you generate, is the type of location you will have”.

Digital Moda’s CCO added that the key to operating in a technology-driven field for high-fashion companies was to integrate “right” assortment with suitable content. The CCO believed that only some of Digital Moda’s e-commerce peers “understood the cultural significance of content creation” for fashion companies. Successful peers, he suggested, had developed “a lot of content around the product” introduced on their website.

It was common that the team in charge of initial e-commerce negotiations with fashion companies at Digital Moda started out by outlining the emerging demography in e-commerce fashion by buttressing and weakening the position of various players. Samplemod, for example, was considered to be culturally beneficial as a model to the fashion industry. The narratives for legitimization pursued by Samplemod were aligned with Digital Moda’s own approach. Similar to Digital Moda, Samplemod had pursued moral and pragmatic legitimacy by creating narratives of an exclusive marketing channel for fashion brands and aligning these narratives with Co-branding and curation practices. The US Director of Marketing at Digital Moda noted that the high-fashion orientation of Samplemod created visible recognition for this company and, as a result, this player was validated as a favorable platform for fashion companies. In short, Digital Moda’s executives (the Head of Global Buying in this quote) created an affirmative valuation for Samplemod by conceptualizing the company as a model that “gives the customer and the market very strongly the message that they are very good at what they do. There is the perception that they are telling a very nice story, a fairytale; and then, the real exclusivity”.

Conflicts in acknowledging the legitimacy of other peers in the field arose for Digital Moda executives only when the team perceived that there was misalignment between “thinking” and “doing” in their e-commerce colleagues. In short, when the narratives for legitimization of other e-commerce actors did not correspond with the actual practice developed by them. Digital Moda executives were, for example, wary of supporting the legitimacy of Vente-Privee, a long-time competitor of Samplemod. Vente-Privee was a French company started in 2001 as a direct-to-consumer e-commerce model. The narrative for legitimizing Vente-Privee was initially focused around hosting of high-fashion brand sales for a members-only audience at deeply discounted prices. The company has, since, expanded in size and revenue: over €3.1 billion in 2016 (Agnew 2017). Despite the original scope of legitimization, in addition to fashion product Vente-Privee augmented the range of offerings with a variety

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