Mytheresa North America president Heather Kaminetsky: ‘I feel for younger digital businesses’

On the latest Glossy Podcast, Heather Kaminetsky, president of Mytheresa North America, discusses what’s driving U.S. sales, which increased 17% year-over-year in the company’s most recently reported quarter. She also discusses how Mytheresa is attracting top-spending U.S. consumers — the number of those fitting the bill increased by 48% between September and December. 

Loyalty via experiences

“We don’t actually have what consumers in the U.S. think of as a loyalty program. Mytheresa doesn’t have a loyalty program that’s based on points. We pride ourselves on creating experiences for our clients — experiences that maybe they wouldn’t take themselves on. In addition to just creating experiences, it cultivates a community within the consumer base.”

The US as a growth leader

“Our [U.S.] results in Q2 definitely over-indexed the global business. In the U.S., I feel very strongly that we don’t have exact competition. The Mytheresa products that we have on the website and the brands that we have are truly luxury. By saying that we only have 250 brands, where many e-commerce websites in the U.S. have thousands of brands, we’re already creating a curation. And then within the brand curation, we’re creating a curation with a very strong point of view. We’re doing our own thing, even though the markets will lump a bunch of e-commerce [companies] together. We’re very strongly forging our own path. … We set up the U.S. business almost three years ago, and it’s continuing to grow as we’re building market share.”

The importance of profitability

“In Q2, our EBITDA was adjusted at 4%. In e-commerce and digital, ever since the year 2000, there have been all of these companies that have launched. They’ll be cited as unicorns, and everyone will want in on them, but there’s no money. It’s just either investment on top of investment or debt. And then, over time, at a certain point in anyone’s company, there has to be a point of profitability to continue.”

A full-funnel marketing strategy

“We obviously have performance marketing and direct response marketing. In order to be in the game of e-commerce, you have to have it. But another layer to what we do is physical pop-ups. … And what these programs allow us to do is to speak to more people about who we are, whether they come visit us and meet our personal shoppers or they see the press and the social [coverage] that we receive from these different programs. … In any marketing funnel, the objective is to convert the consumer to your website as fast as possible. If you’re only doing bottom-of-the-funnel marketing, it’s going to take more time to get someone to convert because they don’t know who you are — there’s no context. So you need a full funnel. What we’ve been trying to do is create more awareness around Mytheresa, whether it’s through our pop-ups, events, brand exclusives or activations. And we do dinners with our clients and invite their plus-ones so they can learn about us. The more people in the Mytheresa community — speaking about the incredible product, the incredible service, the personal shopping experiences — the better it is in the entire marketing funnel. Speaking about marketing specifically, a lot of companies launched in the past few years. And over the pandemic, the cost per acquisition on some of the different marketing platforms came down quite a bit. But now, it’s super high. There are so many new digital businesses that have launched in the past few years, it’s making it prohibitive to acquire consumers at a normal CAC or a CAC that’s acceptable for their business. And that’s been challenging. I actually feel for younger businesses.”