Article

5min read

Luxury’s Secret Weapon | Anaïs Levy

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.

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Article

1min read

From “What If” to “What Works”: How AB Tasty AI Transforms Experimentation

If you’ve ever wondered what to test next, struggled to get developer time, or felt overwhelmed by reporting dashboards, you’re not alone.

These are the frustrations experimentation teams face daily. That’s why we built AB Tasty AI—a suite of AI designed not to add hype to your workflow, but to genuinely help you move faster, test smarter, and get real business impact from your experimentation program.

With AB Tasty AI, those roadblocks disappear. Our AI guides you through ideation, building, personalization, and analysis—so you can focus less on the “what ifs” and more on the results that matter.

Let’s walk through how it works.

AI that crushes your “We’re guessing what to test next” problem

Step 1: Ideation generation

In many organizations, idea generation depends on gut feelings or endless whiteboard sessions that rarely produce actionable outcomes. That’s where AB Tasty AI steps in.

Our platform scans your pages and surfaces data-backed test ideas that are proven to make an impact. Instead of guessing, you get a prioritized list of opportunities aligned with your business goals. It’s like having an intelligent co-pilot who not only brainstorms with you but also brings evidence to the table.

AI that eliminates your “Our hypotheses are hunches” frustration

Step 2: Develop a hypothesis

Hypothesis Copilot by AB Tasty

A test idea is only as strong as the hypothesis behind it. Yet many teams struggle to move from fuzzy thinking to clear, structured hypotheses with measurable objectives.

AB Tasty AI eliminates the guesswork by helping you sharpen your hypotheses. You can turn casual “what if we tried this?” conversations into formal statements that define the change, predict the impact, and set up the right metrics for evaluation.

This structured approach not only improves your test quality but also boosts team confidence and stakeholder trust.

AI that annihilates your “I can’t build what I’m thinking” roadblock

Step 3: Start building

One of the biggest blockers in experimentation is the dependency on developer resources. Great ideas often languish in backlogs because the dev team is focused on other priorities.

With AB Tasty AI, you can instantly transform ideas into buildable experiments—no coding required. Whether you want to tweak a button, test a new layout, or launch a more complex variation, our AI makes it possible to build, preview, and launch without waiting weeks for a developer.

This shift not only accelerates testing velocity but also democratizes experimentation, empowering marketers, product managers, and designers to run with their ideas.

AI that ends your “Our personalization feels robotic” paralysis

Step 4: Understand your audience

10 emotional profiles with AB Tasty's EmotionsAI

Many brands struggle with personalization that feels forced, generic, or robotic. Visitors sense it, and the results often disappoint.

AB Tasty AI introduces EmotionsAI Insights, giving you a window into the emotional triggers that shape customer behavior. Instead of relying only on demographic or behavioral data, you get deeper visibility into what truly motivates your audience.

It’s personalization with empathy—designed to feel natural, human, and meaningful.

AI that solves your “I don’t know why visitors convert” mystery

Step 5: Personalize the customer journey

Understanding emotional drivers is just the start. With EmotionsAI Segments, you can act on those insights by creating experiences tailored to specific motivations.

For example, one group of visitors might be motivated by security and reassurance, while another thrives on novelty and excitement. AB Tasty AI combines emotional, behavioral, and contextual data to reveal these distinctions, allowing you to craft experiences that resonate at a deeper level.

The result? More conversions, stronger loyalty, and a customer journey that feels less like a funnel and more like a personalized conversation.

AI that crushes your “I don’t understand this report” problem

Step 6: Analyze your reports

Once experiments are running, the next challenge is often reporting. Traditional dashboards can be dense, and interpreting results takes time—especially if stakeholders want quick answers.

AB Tasty AI simplifies the process with natural language analysis. You can ask plain-English questions like “Which variation performed best with mobile visitors?” and get clear, actionable answers instantly.

This not only saves hours of manual analysis but also democratizes data, empowering non-technical teams to explore results with confidence.

Why AB Tasty AI Stands Out

The market is full of AI solutions, many of which promise more than they deliver. AB Tasty AI is different. We’ve designed it to remove the real blockers experimentation teams face every day:

  • No more guessing what to test
  • No more hunch-based hypotheses
  • No more dev backlog bottlenecks
  • No more robotic personalization
  • No more confusing reports
  • No more lost learnings

In short, AB Tasty AI moves your experiments from start to success.

FAQs about AI in digital experimentation

What type of AI does AB Tasty offer?

AB Tasty offers practical, experimentation-focused AI that supports the full testing journey. This includes AI for idea generation, hypothesis creation, no-code experiment building, emotional personalization (EmotionsAI), natural language reporting, and more.

How does AB Tasty AI help with personalization?

AB Tasty AI uses EmotionsAI to uncover visitor motivations and segment audiences based on emotional, behavioral, and contextual data. This allows businesses to create experiences that feel more human and relevant.

Can AB Tasty AI help non-technical teams run experiments?

Yes. AB Tasty AI empowers marketers, product managers, and designers to launch tests without relying on developers, thanks to its no-code experiment builder.

What makes AB Tasty AI different from other AI solutions on the market?

AB Tasty AI is designed to deliver practical, business-ready solutions. While many AI tools focus on hype, AB Tasty AI helps teams move from “what if” to “what works” by providing tangible results at every stage of the experimentation cycle.