French luxury retailer Hermes plans to update its digital strategy this year with an initial test run “in a small country”, according to chief executive Axel Dumas.

He says 2017 will be “a year of digital change for us”, with the company’s e-commerce sales showing “significantly higher” growth rate than overall turnover.  

Dumas says he is proud of the result considering the company’s website “sort of stumbles along”.
During the Christmas season, the Hermes e-shop was the group’s best-performing outlet for global neck-tie sales.

“Hermes was the first luxury brand to launch e-commerce, in 2001, especially in the US,” says Dumas. “We are primarily retailers and wanted to handle our own online sales directly rather than hand over this business to an external corporate site.”

However, he admits the website has aged while new technologies have forged ahead.

“In wanting to maintain great image quality, we lagged behind in getting a mobile app,” says Dumas, also acknowledging a lack of clear organisation for the website.

“To recreate the magic of Hermes, we decided to make a site where people could lose themselves. The result: people were really lost,” he says.

“We hope to launch the new site this year. We will first run a test in a small country.”