Gilt-y Pleasures

In fashion’s loftiest ranks, the concepts of luxury and discount go together about as well as navy and black, except in one rarefied setting: the sample sale. Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson set out to re-create that élite, high-adrenaline environment with their members-only retail site, gilt.com Every day the site plays host to fashion sales, which, just like the real thing, fling open the doors to the current wares of a single designer—Zac Posen, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Alessandro Dell’Acqua—at insider prices ranging from 50% to 70% off. All sales have a daily start time of noon Eastern and last for a breathless 36 hours. And, of course, only invited guests are privy. (Befriend a member and ask for an invite to join.) “We really prize doing it in a way that is incredibly exciting,” says Maybank. But the bottom line, says Wilson, is that “we provide access to hundreds of highly sought-after brands for both men and women. We have a lot of depth to our site.”

Key to the sample-sale alchemy is that the merchandise is of a high order. Whereas other discount sites source from third parties, Wilson and Maybank and their company, Gilt Groupe, based in New York City, work directly with each design house. “We are actually helping a lot of designers, especially in these challenging times, because we are able to sell so much volume that our sales are meaningful to designers.” So meaningful that a recent Hervé Léger sale sold out in 45 minutes. Indeed, since the November 2007 launch, membership has grown to more than half a million, with several thousand more joining daily. Meanwhile, revenues in the second half of 2008 were double those in the first half; the employee count has topped 100; and the site recently added home décor and will launch this year in Asia.

The A’s, as they call themselves, met in Portuguese class while undergrads at Harvard. Both went on to Harvard Business School, after which Wilson worked for eBay, overseeing eBay Canada and launching eBay Motors, while Maybank ran retail operations at Bulgari and sales-forecasting at Louis Vuitton. Eventually, however, “we discovered we were spending way too much time sneaking to sample sales and taking orders for family members,” Wilson says. “We thought this might be a simpler way to go about it and more fun.” Only now occasional restraint is in order. “We actually have a policy that we can’t buy merchandise until six hours after the sale starts,” Maybank says. “We want our customers to have first dibs.”