Christie’s: How Digital Is Driving Sales of Big-Ticket Items
This article first appeared in the special edition of The State of Fashion: Watches and Jewellery, co-published by The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company. To learn more and download a copy of the report, click here.
When Christie’s launched its first online jewellery sale in 2011 with a collection of Elizabeth Taylor’s costume jewellery, online was meant to be a secondary channel to live sales. Less than a decade later, the pandemic has shifted the auction house’s priorities considerably. In 2020, the number of online jewellery auctions increased 143 percent year-on-year for the British firm and the overall value of online sales in the category has more than doubled.
According to Christie’s global managing director of luxury, Aline Sylla-Walbaum, who oversees the jewellery, watch, handbag and wine categories, 75 percent of Christie’s luxury auctions will be held online by 2022. Having kept a close eye on the development of digital technologies, from virtual try-ons and blockchain to the possibility of selling on China’s social platforms like WeChat and Xiaohongshu, Sylla-Walbaum now believes that digital channels will be responsible for attracting even more jewellery buyers to auction. If a centuries-old auction house like Christie’s can deploy the digital transformation needed for the future, she suggests, so too can reluctant jewellery brands.
BoF: Large price tags no longer represent the same barrier to selling fine jewellery online as they once did, but customers still expect a high-end experience. How have you managed shifting big-ticket item sales to the online environment?
Aline Sylla-Walbaum: Auctions have been working well since 1744 when Sotheby’s started them, and since 1766 when Christie’s started theirs. But if you take that competing historical [offline] sales channel out of the equation and ask yourself if there’s a rational reason why higher value lots shouldn’t be performing well [online] today — and you find out that there’s not — well then you try it. In purely online sales last year [in 2020], 28 jewellery lots sold for over £100,000 ($140,000). We just need to be bolder and the greater success we see online, the more comfortable consigners will be.
