Italist Continues To Grow In The Luxury Ecommerce Marketplace

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While the overall luxury market may be in decline, Italist, which enables consumers to shop the streets of Italy at local prices – up to 40% less than prices in other countries, including the U.S. – continues to expand. Italist partners with over 2,000 of the world's top designer brands, offering a curated selection of men's and women's apparel, accessories, shoes, home and kids at Italian retail prices.

Italist is thinking about establishing a physical presence in the U.S., and entering new local markets such as Korea and possibly China with sites in the local languages. The company, which is based in L.A., is considering New York for a store or activation.

Markets in Texas are also relevant as is Miami, CEO Diego Abba said. "It could also be some place in the Middle East. That's a very interesting market for us. The Middle East web site started in 2015 and we recently added the Arab language version. We also localized the web site for Japan."

Italist's prices in Italy can be lower in absolute terms, even with currency exchange rates because there are no importer or distributor costs like there often are in other countries and the cost of doing business is lower in terms of rents and labor costs.

"What we were thinking in the beginning was to leverage the lower prices Europe has, particularly Italy, and the ability of the Italian buyer and the multi-brand stores to select the items," Abba said. "We'd make it easy and pay the relative duties, the taxes, VAT automatically via the platform."

Rather than finding ways to circumvent U.S. import laws, Italist pays all foreseeable customs and duties upfront, saving consumers the hassle of additional fees.

Abba claims that Italist was the first company in its cohort to pay sales tax in the U.S. "We were always very compliant around the world, including in Australia," he said. We were the first to pay local VAT in Europe."

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