Anaïs Levy shares how luxury brands use experimentation to balance brand image with business performance, plus why removing prices can actually boost conversions.
Anaïs Levy knows the secret behind what drives luxury digital experiences. As the E-commerce & Omnichannel Services Insights Manager at the Kering Group, the powerhouse group behind iconic luxury brands such as Gucci, Balenciaga, and Saint Laurent to name a few, she leverages over ten years in conversion rate optimization to help some of the largest luxury brands build dazzling digital experiences.
Before joining Kering, Anaïs worked across various industries, from travel giant Expedia to luxury group LVMH. Her unique position involves analyzing business performance across multiple luxury brands, helping them make data-driven decisions while respecting their distinct artistic visions. As a long-term AB Tasty customer and frequent speaker at industry events, Anaïs brings a rare perspective on how luxury brands navigate the delicate balance between brand image and business optimization.
Anaïs Levy spoke with AB Tasty’s Head of Marketing and host of “The 1000 Experiments Club” podcast, John Hughes, about navigating creative constraints in luxury experimentation, leveraging cross-brand benchmarking to drive results, and how omnichannel thinking is revolutionizing conversion rate optimization in the luxury space.
Here are some of the takeaways from their conversation.
Beyond the website: Luxury’s omnichannel reality
The numbers tell a story that completely reframes how we should think about luxury e-commerce: “Among all our visitors, if we sum up visitors in the stores and visitors on our websites, the majority, like 90% is coming to the website and 10% is our traffic in store,” Anaïs shares.
But here’s the twist—most purchases still happen offline. This flips traditional CRO thinking on its head.
“When you have this overview of understanding the business, understanding how luxury websites fit into the whole customer journey, conversion rate optimization is about understanding how you make the most of each asset you have,” she explains.
For luxury brands, websites serve multiple purposes beyond direct sales. Customers use them for research and discovery, to prepare for store visits, for aspirational browsing, and to access omnichannel services like click-and-collect or appointment booking.
“We know we have aspirational customers, but we were not treating them as a specific segment. So everybody coming to the website should in the end convert. And I guess now with the rise of omnichannel and services… we have come to this conclusion that a significant amount of traffic is not going to purchase online,” Anaïs notes.
The takeaway? Stop measuring luxury e-commerce success purely on online conversion rates. Instead, it’s about thinking bigger. How does your digital experience drive overall brand engagement and omnichannel revenue?
The art of compromise with creative constraints
Working with luxury brands means constant negotiation between artistic vision and business performance. “It’s a lot of compromise,” Anaïs admits. “The brand image, the design is really the voice of the artistic director.”
But here’s where persistence pays off. When faced with a creative “no,” Anaïs doesn’t give up—she waits, gathers more data, and asks again. “You have to be stubborn because it could be a no. But two months, three months, six months after you ask again and one day you would have a yes,” she explains.
Her secret weapon? Benchmark data across sister brands. When one Kering brand achieves better checkout completion rates than another, it becomes harder to argue against proven improvements.
“If your sister brands can achieve these figures and they have kind of the same backbone, the same services, same offer, it means that there is something that we are not doing right,” she points out.
This creates a unique advantage where luxury brands can iterate on proven concepts while maintaining their distinct identities. Anaïs’s team has built AB test catalogs shared across all brands and runs group-wide experimentation events to facilitate this knowledge sharing.
Think global, analyze local with segmentation
Anaïs’s team runs experiments globally but analyzes results with surgical precision. “The tip I would give to people who would listen to this podcast is really think global, because then if you make it work for most of your users, your gains are way higher,” she advises.
But the magic happens in the analysis. “When you analyze, don’t forget to try looking at some important segments. So countries could be some… We are using a lot EmotionsAI segmentation to analyze the results because it gives you ideas about why the ‘Competition’ segment didn’t like these experiments,” she explains.
This granular approach reveals opportunities for personalization. By breaking down results by country, device, and behavioral and emotional segments, teams uncover insights that would be invisible in aggregate data.
The strategy works because it balances efficiency with insight: global rollouts maximize impact and streamline development, while segmented analysis reveals why certain groups respond differently, creating opportunities for follow-up experiments that target specific segments with tailored experiences.
What else can you learn from our conversation with Anaïs Levy?
- The surprising price experiment: How removing prices from product listing pages actually increased conversions by focusing attention on products rather than cost
- AI’s luxury future: From productivity tools to conversational search that mimics in-store personal shopping experiences
- The newsletter discovery: How a failed lazy-loading test accidentally revealed hidden engagement opportunities in page footers
- Cross-brand collaboration: The internal tools and processes that help luxury brands share learnings while maintaining their unique identities
About Anaïs Levy
Anaïs Levy has over ten years of experience in conversion rate optimization, spanning industries from travel (Expedia) to luxury (LVMH, Kering). At Kering Group, she manages business performance and insights across multiple luxury brands, including Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga. Her unique role involves balancing data-driven optimization with the creative constraints of luxury brand management, making her a sought-after speaker on experimentation in highly regulated creative industries.
About 1,000 Experiments Club
The 1,000 Experiments Club is an AB Tasty-produced podcast hosted by John Hughes, Head of Marketing at AB Tasty. Join John as he sits down with the experts in the world of experimentation to uncover their insights on what it takes to build and run successful experimentation programs.
