Vanessa Friedman

IN A small house in south London, five executives of the high-end fashion retailer Matchesfashion.com sat around an oval conference table, discussing a coming event. From outside, the house looked like any sweet two-storey London mews, with a cobblestone courtyard and small balcony, but inside, it was all white and open plan – more Silicon Valley than Staffordshire. The topic under discussion that July day was the introduction of a new line by Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier, two hip British designers, at London Fashion Week, and how Matchesfashion.com would promote it. The conversation touched on mainstream news coverage, but it mostly covered how to attract fashion bloggers and which social media platforms to exploit. The subject of Periscope came up. “What is Periscope?” asked a sandy-haired man, sitting at one end of the table. That was Tom Chapman, who, along with his wife, Ruth, a tall, graceful woman with shoulder-length white hair who was sitting at the other end of the table, founded Matchesfashion 28 years ago as a single highend, multibrand boutique in Wimbledon. They were trailblazers, becoming the first such retailer in Britain to sell Prada, Versace, Ferré and Dolce & Gabbana.

Now Tom and Ruth Chapman, 52 and 53, again find themselves bushwhacking in uncharted terrain: they are among a handful of retailers in the luxury sector proactively managing the transition to online sales. These days, they are confronted as often with the rapidly shifting trends in the digital world as with the latest season’s colours or silhouettes.

“It’s a live-stream service around Twitter,” explained Alex Whitlock, the social media manager, describing Periscope. “It’s pretty addictive.”

“Bloggers love it,” said Jess Christie, the global communications director.

“Is it new?” Tom Chapman ventured, with an apologetic grimace.

At this, Ruth Chapman smiled gently and glanced expectantly over at Ulric Jerome, 37, the company’s recently appointed chief executive, former chief operating officer and overall tech guru. He nodded encouragingly back at the two founders. He had heard these sorts of questions before.

The Chapmans, though not old, are old school: they believe in the primacy of the customer experience, in service, and in the allure of an aesthetic point of view. They believe in touch, and talk.

They also, however, have come to believe that the future of their business and a route to global expansion lie online, and they had the self-awareness to recognise they needed help to make that work.

So, in 2013, they hired Jerome, a co-founder of Pixmania, a consumer goods e-commerce site based in Paris, with the mandate that he reshape the digital operation for the future – which effectively meant reshaping the entire company. To test the Chapmans’ commitment, he suggested renaming the brand, then called Matches, after its website. From there, there would be no going back.

Today, even the company’s physical stores bear the name “Matchesfashion.com” on their windows. If the new name is a little unwieldy, it is also a signal of the company’s evolution from a local bricks-and-mortar retailer with a small e-commerce operation into a global, speciality, luxury e-commerce operation – with a small bricks-and-mortar presence. This year, 85 per cent of the company’s projected $200 million (£127.5m) in revenue will come from online sales. Seventy-two per cent of that revenue will come from overseas.

This is a new look for the luxury sector, where the fight for e-commerce dominance is finally heating up. This year, the two largest luxury online retailers, Neta-porter (owned by Richemont) and Yoox (listed on the Milan stock exchange), announced a merger that would mean combined sales of $1.5 billion. Those sites were built as e-commerce companies, however, while Matchesfashion.com and a few other boutique sites like Mytheresa and Luisa Via Roma began as physical stores. (Matchesfashion.com has four stores in London and a private shopping town house, as well as the licence to operate four Diane von Furstenberg stores and two Max Mara stores.)

“Seven years ago,” Tom Chapman said, “if you’d asked me if we would consider going into an international market, I would have said, ‘Well, that’s a bit of a challenge. Maybe some day we’ll have one other store somewhere’.”

But in an age when consumers are accustomed to buying whatever they want on their laptops and phones, another shop, even on the most elegant boulevard, can’t come close to the global reach of a shop on the web. In recognition of this reality, in July the Chapmans moved aside to become co-executive chairs, and named Jerome CEO of Matchesfashion.com. A technology entrepreneur, Jerome now sits at the top of a heritage luxury retailer, managing its growth in a careful equilibrium with the guardians of its fashion sensibility.

Since Jerome’s arrival two years ago, the name is not the only thing that has changed at Matchesfashion.com. Instead of art on his office walls, there are computer screens that display rapid updates on the company’s business in 20 countries: sales figures, number of orders, comparables from the day, week and year earlier.

He increased the “traffic acquisition” team to 25 from three people and put them outside his office door.

And while his dream to provide free food within 15ft of every person – something he had seen on a tour of Google – was not exactly within the budget, he managed to provide free Coco Pops and Fruit ’n’ Fibre cereal near the refrigerator.

The Coco Pops are not a bad symbol for how far the company’s ambitions have come – and how far they still have to go. Matchesfashion sells 50,000 style options by more than 400 designers, and the average customer spends £430 per order – compared with less than £100 for the more mass-focused British fashion e-retailer Asos.com. The company ships to 176 countries, with the United States its second-biggest single market after Britain.

Rumours were rife in May that the Chapmans were talking to Morgan Stanley about a potential stock market listing, but Tom Chapman and Jerome deny any plans to go public – at least in the next four to five years.

Matchesfashion’s independence allows for a highly