HauteLook

» see hautelook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the flash sale for designer fashion was a los angeles invention, and hautelook was one of the first to run it well. a new sale opened every morning at a fixed hour and closed a couple of days later. you got the email in the morning and bought before the size you wanted was gone. it was aimed at american women shopping for discounted labels, and i was a computer engineer in ankara. not the customer they were building for.

the model itself did reach turkey, just not the brand. by 2008 markafoni was running the same private-sale mechanic in turkish, and trendyol followed later. so the idea was familiar even where hautelook was not. what did not travel was hautelook.com, which shipped inside the united states and spoke to an american wardrobe.

adam bernhard launched it in los angeles in december 2007. nordstrom bought it in march 2011 for around 180 million dollars in stock, the first time a traditional department store had swallowed an online sample-sale company. for a decade it ran as a nordstrom property. then in 2021 nordstrom retired the name and moved every sale into nordstrom rack. the customers stayed. the brand did not.

~ the case file ~

~ the model ~

private sales worked on scarcity and a clock. a brand dumped overstock at half price or less. hautelook put it behind a member login and let the countdown do the rest. gilt groupe and rue la la ran the same play in the united states, markafoni ran it in turkey. for a few years around 2010 it looked like the future of off-price retail, the department store rebuilt as a daily email.

~ the actual end ~

nordstrom never needed two off-price web brands. it had nordstrom rack, and after the 2020 retail collapse it consolidated. the hautelook app and site were folded into nordstromrack.com in 2021, sales and members carried over, the fourteen-year-old name simply stopped being printed. no bankruptcy, no auction. it was absorbed until there was nothing left to call hautelook.

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