Net-a-porter Confirms Beauty Business Will Shift to Affiliate Model in 2025

Net-a-porter is shuttering its in-house beauty business, with plans to instead introduce an affiliate beauty selling model in early 2025, the luxury e-tailer confirmed to WWD.

With this shift, Net-a-porter will maintain a beauty shopping vertical on its website, though the platform will no longer manage a beauty inventory of its own, instead directing shoppers to brands’ own direct-to-consumer channels to complete purchases.

As part of the restructuring, the retailer — which previously shrunk its beauty assortment in February, marking a pivot toward ultra-luxury price points in what one source described to WWD as an effort to give the ailing beauty business a boost — will trim its assortment even further. The platform will continue to publish beauty commerce content via its editorial arm, Porter.

In an email statement sent to WWD, the company said: “Net-a-porter is launching a new affiliate program for some of the world’s top beauty brands. Starting next year, customers will be directed to partners’ e-commerce channels to complete their purchases. This new program will leverage Net-a-porter’s award-winning editorial platform Porter and community to drive high quality traffic to our partners’ channels.”

The company did not confirm which brands will participate in the upcoming affiliate model, though its present beauty assortment spans skin care, makeup and fragrance brands including Le Labo, La Mer, Hourglass Cosmetics, Diptyque, Sisley Paris, Augustinus Bader, Oribe, Westman Atelier, Gucci Beauty and Eighth Day. 

The shift comes at a time of upheaval for the luxury e-commerce space. In 2023 Farfetch shuttered its beauty arm just one year after acquiring Violet Grey and launching a beauty assortment of its own featuring 100-plus brands. The e-tailer then entered pre-pack administration and was acquired by South Korea’s Coupang for $500 million.

Matches, meanwhile, was placed into administration by Frasers Group in March just two months after the group purchased the e-tailer from Apax Partners for 52 million pounds, with the company saying of the decision: “It has become clear that too much change would be required to restructure it.” Frasers subsequently bought certain IP rights to Matches from the administrators.

Net-a-porter first added beauty to its offering in 2013 with a debut assortment that featured Aesop, 3Lab, Joya Studio, Philip B, Chantecaille, Sarah Chapman and more. Later that same year, the company became the first retailer to carry Charlotte Tilbury’s makeup line, also launching Ilia Beauty and Glossier long before their respective forays into Sephora. Dr. Barbara Sturm, too, looked to the retailer as a launchpad in 2014 when she introduced her now-Puig-owned luxury skin care line.

Alison Loehnis, then-president of Net-a-porter and current ad interim president and chief executive officer of the company, told WWD at the time: “We see [beauty] as so symbiotic with the rest of our offerings…as we started to expand, it was a disconnect to not be able to offer beauty. By being at the front lines, we have an enormous amount of insight and exposure to talent and also product.”

As competition heats up and niche brands increasingly enter large specialty retailers such as Sephora and Ulta Beauty, however, it has become increasingly tough for luxury e-commerce platforms to keep their beauty businesses profitable.