At a dinner for 25 of Net-a-Porter’s best customers at the company’s London headquarters, Chief Executive Heather Kaminetsky asked one question: how can we do better? She has asked it at every opportunity since taking over in April 2025 with orders to turn the company around. “Customers have had a lot to say.”
They had reason. Net-a-Porter pioneered selling designer clothes online in 2000 and then, under Richemont’s majority ownership from 2010, lost its way: inconsistent service, lost packages, slow returns, and a push toward cheaper goods and deeper discounts that annoyed the shoppers who actually paid. Richemont eventually sold it, along with Mr. Porter and Yoox, to the parent of Mytheresa, loading the deal with cash and credit in exchange for roughly a third of the shares of what is now LuxExperience.
The number the strategy is built on
About 4% of Net-a-Porter’s shoppers account for almost half its sales. Kaminetsky, who came up in marketing at Barneys and at Net-a-Porter itself, zeroed in on them. Thousands of emails introducing herself and asking for feedback. Fireside chats. More designer events in a year than in the prior three combined — a vintage-trench customization with Burberry, a luxury train to a country estate with Carolina Herrera. Her contact details handed out at every one.
What came back was unglamorous and specific. Better personal shoppers. More brands. Better tracking and easier returns. Snappier uniforms for the drivers. Private-jet delivery, rejected. She adopted most of the rest: return labels in the box, drivers in Mr. Porter uniforms, live parcel maps, same-day delivery expanded to the Jersey Shore after shoppers who summered there asked “Why don’t you like the Shore?” When one customer wanted a sold-out pair of Khaite leopard pants, the Khaite CEO had a single pair made.
The quarter ended June 30 shows the results: sales up 4.3%, the U.S. up more than 13%, profit €7.4 million ($8.5 million) from €1 million a year earlier, top customers spending 9.4% more. Average order value rose 9% to €885, or $1,016 — and, as the Journal notes, it costs about the same to ship $100 of clothing as $1,000. The competition helped by falling over: Farfetch nearly collapsed before its 2024 sale, and Saks and Neiman Marcus only left bankruptcy in June.
Our read
This desk reads a story like this twice: once as business, once as arithmetic. The business lesson is a good one — find the customers who matter, ask them, do what they say. The arithmetic lesson is the reason it belongs in a Saturday planning paper. When 4% of anything produces half the result, that 4% is not a customer list. It is the company. Losing a handful of them is not a bad quarter; it is the reason Richemont sold.
The same math runs through most of the portfolios we open. Four or five names are half the return, often half the risk, and the owner does not always know which four. Concentration is fine when it is chosen and sized. It is dangerous when it is discovered. The July Risk Atlas graded our own book “partial” on that square, and this is what the grade means in practice: know your 4%, and make sure the rest of the book could survive a quarter without it.