What luxury brands can learn from DNVBs

By challenging convention, Digital Native Vertical Brands (DNVBs) are developing a specific business model that masters the entire supply chain and sells directly to the customer. The key question is how luxury brands can take inspiration from this, by encouraging collaboration and mutual learning in a spirit of innovation.

DNVB: a model born for digital

Definition and key principles

At the crossroads of cutting-edge branding and tech, DNVBs (Digital Native Vertical Brands) have redefined the rules of the game. Born with digital, they have not had to adapt, but have instead redefined its codes. These brands have understood that, to exist today, it is no longer enough to sell; they need to tell their story, create and engage.

Their secret? A strong identity, a highly developed brand narrative, and a closeness to their community that is the envy of many more traditional players. Far from traditional models, DNVB brands control their image from the first pixel to the last package. They integrate everything, from creation to distribution, including customer relations. A vertical, agile and efficient approach.

In the world of DNVB marketing, every detail counts: Meticulous UX, Instagrammable packaging, immersive storytelling, seamless customer experience. In short, this totally disruptive model is designed to appeal to a demanding digital generation that is often wary of over-slick marketing pitches.

The Direct-to-Consumer model

The Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) model is one of the foundations of DNVB's success. It works without intermediaries, and has total control over the distribution of its messages. The brand talks directly to its customers. It sells on its own site, and manages its own logistics, after-sales service and data. The result: total control over the customer experience, improved margins and the ability to adjust its digital strategy in real time.

This direct link creates a new kind of complicity between brand and consumer. We are no longer addressing a target but a community. We are no longer selling a product, but a lifestyle. This is where luxury brands, historically more distant, have a card to play: by drawing inspiration from this transparency, this responsiveness, this active listening, without denying their DNA.

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Key benefits of DNVB

Operational agility

If there's one quality that sets DNVBs apart from traditional brands, it's their agility. Far removed from cumbersome hierarchies and timetables fixed a year in advance, they move fast, testing, adjusting and pivoting. A campaign isn't working? It's withdrawn the same day. Is the packaging popular? It's changed within the week. This operational responsiveness, made possible by a light, integrated structure, enables DNVB brands to keep pace with their community and digital trends.

This is a considerable strategic advantage, particularly when compared with the giants of the luxury goods industry, who are sometimes held back by their internal processes or institutional heritage. For the major brands, observing this operational agility is a way of learning to move faster, without losing consistency or excellence.

Customer proximity

Luxury, by its very nature, has long cultivated a form of distance. The DNVBs, on the other hand, are betting everything on customer proximity. Social networks, personalised newsletters, ultra-reactive after-sales service, integrated feedback in real time... Everything is designed to create a sincere, direct and even emotional relationship. Customers don't just buy: they participate, comment, sometimes co-construct.

This relationship, nurtured on a daily basis, is a goldmine for refining a digital strategy, developing new products and building loyalty without artifice. Customers are no longer recipients: they become ambassadors.

Community branding

Finally, DNVBs excel at community branding. Each brand tells a story, but above all, it invites people to become part of it. Whether it's a question of ethical values, lifestyle, humour or commitment, everything is done to unite a group of people who recognise themselves in the universe proposed.

DNVB don't try to speak to everyone: they speak to someone. It is this focus on identity that enables them to create active, committed communities, ready to like, share, comment and above all... buy. Unlike top-down communication, this is about belonging.

For luxury brands, often perceived as aspirational but distant, this community dynamic can be a powerful source of inspiration: how do you create links without becoming commonplace? How do you bring people together without sacrificing exclusivity?

Luxury and DNVB

Reinventing the customer experience

Luxury has always relied on the experience, but today it is no longer limited to the boutique. With DNVBs, in the age of digital first, the customer experience extends beyond the point of sale: it begins online, continues on Instagram, is expressed in a personalised email, and is confirmed in the quality of after-sales service.

For luxury brands, it is not a question of reproducing the codes of DNVB brands identically, but of integrating them with finesse, for example by creating a fluid omnichannel experience that combines emotion, excellence and immediacy.

Integrating D2C into historic houses

Another major challenge is integrating the Direct-to-Consumer model into houses that are sometimes centuries old. D2C provides total control over distribution, customer data and image - strategic elements that DNVB brands have been able to exploit from the outset.

Some luxury brands have understood this. By developing their own e-commerce platforms, bringing certain logistics chains in-house, and launching exclusive services on their direct channels, they are regaining control.

Appealing to a younger target without losing their DNA

DNVB brands appeal to Millennials and Gen Z with ease. With their quirky tone, transparency, strong values and commitment to society, they tick all the boxes. Luxury brands, on the other hand, are moving forward more cautiously. The challenge is to seduce without betraying its DNA.

Some brands are succeeding. By drawing inspiration from the cultural codes of younger generations, without denying their own high standards. By banking on digital innovation without sacrificing quality. By playing with pop culture codes, but always in their own way.

The challenge is there: to remain rare in a world of immediacy, to remain demanding in a world of simplification. Fortunately, luxury brands have long been used to reinventing themselves!

Inspiring cases in fashion and luxury

Sézane, Balzac Paris, Seasonly

French brands Sézane, Balzac Paris and Seasonly perfectly embody the DNVB spirit applied to fashion and beauty. What they have in common is a clear vision, an engaged community, embodied storytelling and an obsession with detail.

Sézane was one of the first brands to understand the importance of customer relationships in the digital world: an ultra-careful newsletter, collection drops that are expected to be events, and shops that are designed as places to live. The result is a ready-to-wear and leather goods brand that is desirable, identifiable and almost 100% online.

Balzac Paris, for its part, is banking on ethics and transparency, with a real slow fashion approach. Each piece tells a story, and each commitment is taken on board. And it is precisely this sincere positioning that attracts a demanding but connected clientele.

As for Seasonly, it is revolutionising the world of skincare by adopting the codes of luxury (sensory experience, meticulous products), with the agility of a DNVB: online appointment booking, well-oiled community management, short and effective ranges.

LVMH

Among the luxury giants, LVMH has founded the Maison des Startups to support the digital transformation of the group's brands.  It enables the talents of the Houses to co-create new commercial solutions with the best start-ups in the industry.

In addition, the LVMH Innovation Award detects startups every year by challenging them to invent the future of luxury. Since 2018, the most relevant solutions are selected annually from hundreds of candidates and presented in Paris at VivaTech. Each year, a final ceremony rewards the winning startups, highlighting their successes and giving them unique visibility within the Group.

Italic, Mejuri and other international players

Internationally too, DNVB brands are shaking up the established order. Italic, for example, offers products made in the same factories as the big luxury houses... but sold at a fair price, without a logo, and direct to the consumer. A positioning that raises questions about the real value of luxury products... and about the weight of the brand itself.

Mejuri, for its part, has redefined the codes of jewellery with an inclusive, modern and, above all, highly connected approach: weekly drops, communication geared towards the self-gifting generation, transparency about materials. All with a refined aesthetic that could make some of the big names blush.

We could also mention Everlane, Glossier, Warby Parker... all players who prove that a good product, a sincere brand and a sharp digital strategy can rival, and sometimes even inspire, the pillars of global luxury.

Well-established luxury brands have nothing to fear from DNBVs, as their image remains strong and they continue to make people dream. On the other hand, they are strongly advised to take inspiration from purely digital brands in creating an engaged community, because customers are more than ever looking for strong relationships with the brands they choose.