While this past year has been challenging for the luxury industry with luxury tourism grinding to a halt and offline stores shuttering, the bright spot for many brands was Alibaba’s Tmall Luxury Pavilion. Sales on the luxury platform grew 159 percent year-on-year from January to March in 2021. Currently, more than 200 leading luxury brands, an increase of 150 before the Covid-19 pandemic including Balmain, Cartier, Ferragamo, Prada, Chloé, Saint Laurent and Van Cleef & Arpels have opened storefronts on the Tmall Luxury Pavilion. This includes 17 LVMH brands including Rimowa, Marc Jacobs, Dom Perignon, Kenzo, Hennessy, Dior Beauty, Guerlain, Givenchy, Tag Heuer and Zenith.

Recently, the Tmall Luxury Pavilion partnered with Watches and Wonders, a leading luxury watch fair organized by the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie (FHH), to showcase new offerings from 11 premium luxury watch brands including Cartier, Chopard, Piaget, Vacheron Constantin, as well as other featured brands from Net-a-Porter’s Tmall flagship store. This partnership follows two successful digital events FHH hosted with Tmall Luxury Pavilion last year when its offline shows were disrupted due to the pandemic.