This luxury goods site is a ‘retail playground’ for the 1 percent
Call it the Amazon for the 1 percent.
A 3-year old e-commerce site that sells super-luxury goods — think $190,000 tricked-out Jeeps and $19,000 ostrich duffel bags — to the world’s wealthiest consumers is booking sales increases of roughly 300 percent.
While the site, World’s Best, is working off a small revenue base, it is still experiencing rapid growth while other retailers are doing back-flips to avoid bankruptcy.
The home, jewelry and lifestyle items offered by World’s Best, from brands like Hermes and Chanel and others, typically run fro, $5,000 to $500,000.
But there is also a $1.7 million personal submarine.
“If something is being sold in Nordstrom, you won’t find it on our site,” said co-founder Robert Steele, a former division president at PepsiCo.
“Our customers are not trying to get the lowest prices and they don’t want to buy something that they see coming down the street,” Steele told The Post.
Steele launched World’s Best in 2014 with a former JPMorgan private banking exec Kevin Chow with the hope of becoming the retail playground of the rich and richer.
The number of millionaire households is expected to double, to 50 million, by 2019, Steele and Chow said, citing a Credit Suisse report.
The average transaction on the site is $13,000, the execs said.
The owners, after raising cash last year, are looking to raise several million this year to invest in their technology and expand their offerings, the two said.
The customer base includes doctors, lawyers, investment bankers and other professionals with incomes approaching mid-six figures — all the way up to eight-figure earners with private jets and yachts, Steele said.
“Some of these customers own 10,000 to 20,000 acre ranches in Texas and Montana, and would want a jeep to ride off road on their properties,” Steele said, adding that the submarines are small enough to fit in a bay of their yachts.
To be clear, World’s Best is not shipping some of these bigger items to customers or even directly selling them. The site gets a fee from dealer ships.
But those hard to find Birkin bags? Those are shipped directly from World’s Best suppliers to customers homes within one or two days.
One New York City client recently scooped up three Birkin bags for $100,000, Steele said.