Francis Belin is a fashion outsider. That was, in part, what made former Mytheresa CEO Michael Kliger select him as his successor. Kliger himself was ascending to lead LuxExperience, the newly formed parent company created following Mytheresa’s acquisition of competitor Yoox Net-a-Porter (YNAP).
Stakes were high amid the transition. YNAP had toiled for years under the ownership of Richemont, the luxury group that seemed not to know what to do with a fully online retailer. And Mytheresa was in a rare position: as others of its ilk faced fire sales and bankruptcies, Mytheresa continued to see growth, reporting a 9% increase to just over $1 billion in annual sales for 2025. Maintaining that positioning, while reaching into untapped opportunities, is Belin’s main imperative as CEO of Mytheresa as it and YNAP settle into their post-merger era. He joined Mytheresa in January after spending nearly 10 years at auction house Christie’s, where he worked most recently as the president of Asia-Pacific.
Belin joined the Vogue Business Global Summit in Chantilly, France, on May 12 to discuss the interview that landed him the role, the first six months on the job, his outlook on physical retail, and what he’s learned about catering to VICs. Mytheresa is known for its robust clienteling calendar, which typically involves partnering with brands to bring customers to fabulous locations, for the experience and, maybe, to shop. Already, Belin is embracing this modus operandi: just after the summit, he left for a VIC event with Brioni on the Amalfi Coast.
Vogue: I’m sure you’re fully immersed at Mytheresa now, but I’d like to go back to your interview. Why did you want to take this job?
It’s also about the relationship with our customers. I met a lot of customers in the past four months. I talk with them. I ask, why do you shop at Mytheresa? What is it that we don’t have that you wish we had? And if you don’t buy at Mytheresa, where do you shop? So at the end of the day, it looks like it’s an e-commerce business, but in reality, my CEO role is in the relationship business. Now, if you look at this and you compare it to what I was doing for 10 years at Christie’s, serving some of the top collectors in Asia, it was the same thing. It was all about the relationship with the sellers and the relationship with the buyers.
Vogue: Luxury VICs are among the most sought-after for the luxury industry. You have other retailers and other brands wanting their wallet share. How do you make sure that Mytheresa is their shopping destination?
Francis: What we care deeply about is first looking at who we want to serve and what is this customer looking for? As simple as, which brand do they want? We have 250 brands. Every season, we add a few, we take out a few. You don’t have 750 brands on Mytheresa. Are you looking for a black dress? We give you the best 20 dresses we think we have on the market today. We don’t have a thousand dresses. We don’t want you to be scrolling all the time. So we want to make things very simple and be very spot on with what you’re looking for. We also serve you the best way we can. And at the end, we don’t want this relationship to be just transactional.
There’s no loyalty program at Mytheresa. Even if you’re a top customer, we don’t give you a 10% discount because we can’t give you a 10% discount, by the way. Our economic model does not allow us. It’s probably why some actually got carried away and ended up running out of cash. But people don’t want discounts. They want a great assortment, great curation. They want access to brands that are difficult to find. They want convenience because they have three different locations, or they are busy businesswomen traveling the world and wanting to have a dress shipped here and then there. And at the end, they want flawless service and an emotional connection to what we do. And I think this is the equation of how we’re trying to win in that space. And again, we’re not going to send our top customer a monthly statement of where they stand on qualifying for the next year or whatnot. That is not us.
Vogue: How do you resist pulling such common retail levers like loyalty programs and discounts, especially as I’m sure you have growth goals? How do you grow with restraint?
Francis: First and foremost, we started in Germany many years ago. We expanded in Europe, quite strong in the UK, Italy, France, and Switzerland. Then we started to really invest in the US about four years ago. The US is a phenomenal market for us today. We’re growing very fast, and it’s already our top market. What I find interesting is that the recipe for success needs a few tricks and a few local adaptations, but it’s fundamentally the same [anywhere]. We don’t have to change our DNA to grow in Romania, Poland, Greece, Hong Kong, or Singapore. It’s pretty much the same. So I think first and foremost, we want to continue to be who we’ve been, continue to do the best we can, make sure we have the best brands, the best edits, flawless service, which we constantly monitor, and that we’re able to engage with meaningful interactions and relationships with our clients. And geographic expansion is a big opportunity for us.
Vogue: What are your top categories right now? Where is there opportunity on the assortment front?
Francis: Ready-to-wear for women is about 60%, 65% of what we sell. We have shoes; we have bags and accessories; we have fashion jewelry. We have a men’s business. We do slightly less than 10% of our business with men. And we started fine jewelry two years ago, and it’s still a relatively small part of our business, but we believe that in that field, we have all the cards to be successful. It’s a category that our top client wants. Back to what I was saying before, we don’t sell things that our clients don’t want. We look for what they’re actually looking for, but there is no solid multi-brand jewelry offering online today.
Over time, we’ve also been able to prove that we execute logistically at the right level of service for our clients. So moving a transaction in the $4,000 realm, that these clients have been buying almost three, four times a year for 10 years, into a relationship where we say, “What about this necklace at $15,0000?” It’s fairly easy.
Vogue: How do you create this type of frequent shopping habit with your customer?
Francis: We have to be very active in engaging. We have over a million names in our newsletter database. We want to make sure that our click-through rate is quite high and our conversion rate is also quite high for the industry, and it’s all about relevance. So if you get spammed with things that don’t mean anything to you, then of course, you start to get annoyed. We monitor the unsubscribe rate very closely, and it’s actually quite low. We constantly improve what we put in front of your eyes, so when you click and you look at something, it’s something that speaks to you based on what we’ve learned that you most likely would be interested in. That’s where technology is coming into play.
Vogue: Can you talk more about the role of technology? We’re going to be talking a lot about AI today. What role does AI play in clienteling, or working with customers?
Francis: Technology is at the core of what we do, because it’s always been present. For us, technology has to be flawless, and it has to be invisible. You forget that it’s there because it’s all about the product, the curation, the experience. It’s not about, “Oh, they must have that interesting algorithm.” AI brings a ton of opportunities for us. But we’re not a technology company. We have technology, but we’re not a technology company. If we were, I guess, probably I’m the worst hire they could have thought of. Technology is here to enhance, technology is here to augment, but technology is not here to replace. So if you think of our personal shoppers, there are a lot of things that they could have done manually or taken the best guess on the assortment they want to suggest to a client based on what they know they’ve been shopping for.
If you put a bit of AI in there and say, “You know what? Based on the add to wishlist, based on the add to cart, based on what they bought, based on the behavior and the pattern, we think this could make sense.” But it’s not just AI sending you that recommendation; it’s a person who is fully empowered to actually take the shot on what’s going to be suggested to the client. So I think we will never replace that personal touch and the emotional relationship with clients with technology, because this is what I think has defined our success in the past, and I believe it will define our success in the future. But there’s a range of technologies out there that can actually help us bring it to a higher level of relevance, which ultimately creates a lot of value for our customers.
Vogue: What are your concerns right now about the industry at large? What challenges do you see coming? It’s been a rocky start to the year for luxury. How are you thinking about that? What are you wanting to protect yourself against?
Francis: I don’t think the industry is going through its most golden period. I mean, everybody sees that some are doing better than others, whether it’s fashion brands or retailers. And I think in any world we are in, there are always opportunities. And if you go back to really what matters — who is your client, what matters to them, executing with a lot of discipline on what they expect — I think you have a better chance to navigate the storm, or the heavy rain.
I’ve been watching the whole space from a bit farther away because I was still at Christie’s in the art market. But I think there have been a lot of realizations that things have to change. Luxury is about craftsmanship, innovation, newness — and you can’t get sloppy at it. You have to be, for the prices that we are being charged in these categories, at the top of your game, and creativity has to be important. So I think the [luxury] world is not the most simple, but I think there’s a way within that world to be successful, if you go back to the fundamentals.
Vogue: You talked about customer relationships. What about the brand relationships? How are you maintaining those?
Francis: We meet them. There’s no AI in there. We hop on the plane with my buying team, my inventor team, my PR team, my marketing team, depending on the conversation that we need to have, and we go, and we spend time with them, and we try to understand where they are, where they want to go, what’s important for them, and how that fits into what our customers are expecting. We develop a lot of these relationships into what we do together.
We were at an event with Zimmermann in Lake Como just a few days ago. We had one with Gianvito Rossi in Florence. I have one with Brioni just two days from now, one with Dolce & Gabbana next week. And there’s a lot of conversation between our chief brand officer, our marketing team, and the brands to make sure that we are spot on. But we still show [the product] in a way that shows our personality and that speaks to our customer. There’s a lot of respect for what the brands are actually aiming to project. So all these touchpoints and opportunities are for us a way to build a stronger partnership, a respectful partnership, and so far a very productive and lasting one.
Vogue: Is there a cap to how many events like that your clients can go to, how many you can do in a year?
Francis: We know that these events are very important for our clients, our press partners, and our influencers, and we love to host them. They’re also very important in our relationship with the brands because we’re bringing the brands into the Mytheresa world when we host an event. They meet our clients, they meet our personal shoppers, and they say, “OK, this is what’s happening behind the screen.”
I wouldn’t say there’s a cap, but there is a managed growth of how many we can add. And we found a new concept, which was really successful. We had a pop-up store in St. Moritz from January to March. We took a small space between Louis Vuitton and Dior, and we hosted 30 events with brands, very small events, having a glass of Champagne, a bit of caviar, and meeting a designer or just seeing beautiful objects, and it was hugely successful. So that was a way to say, we’re not going to move the events from one place to another every week, but we can just take one spot. It’s not a shop. It’s a place where we meet you, as a customer, we create that relationship, and you meet our personal shoppers. The intention is not to sell. If we want to sell, we do that much better when you are online. But it’s a way for us to scale. It’s a great platform for us to bring them into the Maison Mytheresa world. And we’re going to have the second edition in the second half of June on a yacht in St. Tropez.
