Chinese Luxury E-Commerce Start-Up Pockets Seed Funding

A snapshot of The Luxury Club's web magazine, whch is one of its promotional tools.

The Chinese luxury e-commerce start-up ‘The Luxury Club’ – or Hui She Shang to use its local name – has completed a round of seed funding. Parkview Ventures and Mousse Partners are the site’s new backers – but an amount has not been disclosed.

The Luxury Club launched in July of this year, aiming to be a top destination for B2C online shopping for luxury goods. All of its products are authentic, and sold under agreements with numerous global brands. As well as the usual array of fashion clothing and accessories, the site also specialises in wines and spirits (which is another booming luxury sector in China) and has tie-ups with labels such as Krug and Dom Perignon.

In a statement today, the site’s founders, Francis Gouten and Remi Chabrat, said that its first round of funding would be used “to accelerate its international brand partnership program and online promotional and sales activities.”

Both Parkview Ventures and Mousse Partners state that they’re backing The Luxury Club because China has so much potential – and so much passion – for luxury goods, and because they see the site as uniquely positioned to be a powerful e-commerce platform.

What’s so unique about the site? Well, it’s actually partnered with – and the website usage is structurally attached to – Alibaba’s (HKG:1688) B2C platform, TMall. Indeed, in order to use The Luxury Club, you must connect it with your Taobao/TMall.com account. This gives the small start-up access to the hundreds of millions of people with those accounts.

Since The Luxury’s Club’s launch it has new competition hitting the luxury goods market in China from all directions. One of the biggest is from Sina, whose Sina Luxury site launched in August with lots of fashion labels on board.

Take a look at The Luxury Club here, though there’s not much to see without hooking it up to a TMall account.