NEW YORK — In June, Rebecca Taylor will start selling its filmy, feminine clothes on the Internet and hopes to do about $1 million in business the first year. The company, whose wholesale business exceeds $30 million a year, has one boutique in the U.S. and 44 stores in Asia. The company plans to open five stores in Hong Kong in the next three years.
The company’s wholesale revenues include sales to eight Rebecca Taylor stores in Asia, but not to its 36 stores in Japan, where the business is operated under a license.
The company has had a Web site for marketing purposes since 1999. Rebecca Taylor revamped the look of its Web site in August with the help of Heu Designs here. The result was a playful and graphically fresh apparel site, with silhouetted figures filled with patterns to resemble fabric appliqués, and an overlay reminiscent of the work of artist Kara Walker with see-through silhouetted kittens that dissolve into the home page. The update was part of a company-wide push to make its brand image and the look of its stores more consistent, starting with the opening of its NoLIta boutique in 2004.
Business Applications & Software Solutions, or BASS, of Cairo, is building the e-commerce portion of the Web site and integrating it with Rebecca Taylor’s existing accounting and inventory system.
“Our choice was to open a second [U.S.] store or do e-commerce,” said chief executive officer Beth Bugdaycay. “We said let’s do e-commerce and then look for a second location.”
Relatively few contemporary brands have e-commerce sites, and those that do tend to also operate brick-and-mortar stores, such as Diane von Furstenberg and Betsey Johnson. Earlier this week, DKNY opened an online store.
The Web site will launch with 12 key looks from the upcoming fall season, with about three items per look. “People will see how Rebecca is putting the outfits together herself,” said Bugdaycay. “Sometimes it’s not obvious, not what the customer naturally picks in the store. What Rebecca puts together is a little bit of a twist, so there’s irony in every outfit, such as a feminine dress with a more tailored vest.”
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When a shopper clicks on an item, she will also see suggested items to go with it. Orders will ship from the company’s warehouse in New Jersey, and salespeople in the NoLIta boutique will write a note to the customer that will be enclosed in every shipment, just as they do in the store, said Bugdaycay.
“We’re hoping an added bit of customer service makes people that much happier to wear Rebecca Taylor no matter where they buy it. They will have warm, fuzzy feelings attached to our brand,” she said.
The e-commerce portion of the site is being developed by BASS for Rebecca Taylor using Microsoft’s Visual Basic and SQL Server. The existing Web site was created by Heu using Macromedia’s Web development tools. BASS is writing a program that creates sales orders and payments for the online store inside Rebecca Taylor’s existing accounting system, so the Web store doesn’t have to be managed separately from the company’s other stores