Mr. Porter

You’ll spot them at any shopping mall or department store: glum-faced men perched wherever they can rest their weary legs, waiting for wives and girlfriends to emerge with their fashion loot. They are begrudgingly living proof, as Natalie Massenet says, that “most men hate shopping”. For Massenet, a former fashion journalist who founded women’s online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter, the key is “most men”. She is banking on the small percentage who are active shoppers to drive the success of Net-a-Porter’s urbane older brother, Mr Porter, which launched in February and is the most ambitious effort yet to harpoon affluent male shoppers—the white whale of online retailing. “We know there’s demand for this,” Massenet told The Wall Street Journal. She’s cracked the code before before: Net-a-Porter in 2000 pioneered the sale of designer goods online to women, spawning imitators, a Web push by everyone from Gucci to Cartier, and a buyer in the form of Swiss luxury group Richemont, which last year snapped up the retailer in a deal that valued it at up to £350 million. Mr Porter has similar ambitions, offering a carefully edited range of luxury brands and products presented with stylish minimalism, modeled primarily by real-world men. While there’s plenty of products that are of-the-moment, the primary emphasis is on classic clothes and accessories. “Men aren’t about trends,” Massenet told American magazine GQ. “They want to build a wardrobe.” She’ll soon learn if that’s true.

Published by AFR BOSS, April 2011.