The Lingerie Boutique Experience, Online: An Interview with Dong Lu, CEO of La Miu

You might think that selling lingerie online would be impossible in China’s still-not-fully-mature ecommerce environment, but you’d be dead wrong. La Miu is doing just that, giving Chinese online shopping a slash of sexiness and giving Chinese women the botique experience — all from the comfort of their own homes. We sat down with Dong Lu, La Miu’s founder and CEO, right after his panel appearance at Disrupt Beijing to learn more about the company.

Selling sexy - La Miu Lingerie

Origins

Lu launched his first start-up, Beyond Tailors, in 2006. That service was an online custom men’s shirt company, but Lu quickly realized that idea wasn’t easily scalable. Looking at the US and Japanese markets, he came to the conclusion that a lingerie retailer like Victoria’s Secret could do well in China, and a company selling mass-produced clothing products for women — while also more risky — ultimately had more potential for growth than a one-off custom clothing company aimed at men. In 2008, he founded La Miu and, he says, “it took off really quickly.”

Lu notes that there was also demand in China for a shopping and customer service experience that wasn’t, well, awful. Many brick-and-mortar shops in China have terrible customer service, and online outlets can be even worse. Lu said he’s built La Miu on the idea that if you trust your customers, they’ll reward you for it, even if a few do try to game the system. And in the absence of other sites doing what La Miu does and offering a good experience and good customer service, the customers have come flocking.

“I feel like I’m in a desert,” Lu says of China’s shopping environment. “My job is to create an oasis.”

Don’t Call it Ecommerce

“A lot of people call us an ecommerce company,” Lu says, “but we’re not an ecommerce company, we’re a branding company. We sell our brand.” Of course, the internet is by far their largest distribution channel, but La Miu also has three brick-and-mortar stores, and Lu stressed that the company is not so much an ecommerce company as it is a company that’s making use of the best way to reach its customers which — for the time being at least — is the internet.

That’s part of the reason Lu chose to eschew sites like Taobao and instead launch La Miu on his own site. A risky move, to be sure, but one that has ultimately paid off. “I want to build a brand,” he said, “I don’t want to just sell a product,” noting that his own background is in branding, not products. “I’m more experienced in the experience industry,” he said, “that’s my strength: creating customer experience.”

another La Miu offering

Building Trust

Of course, the downside to not selling on an established platform like Taobao is that consumer trust has to be earned, and that can be difficult in China. Moreover, Lu pointed out, “99.9 percent” of your customers are “doing something that they’ve never done before” because most Chinese women hadn’t ever bought lingerie online in 2008.

To help fight this, La Miu added a big toll-free number to the top of the site — it’s still there today — so that customers with any questions could call and get the “human touch,” as Lu put it. Within six months of launching the online store, Lu also launched La Miu’s first brick-and-mortar store in a high-end retail district of Beijing, which has also helped create trust.

Selling Sexiness

The one-line introduction of La Miu given to many foreigners is that La Miu is China’s Victoria’s Secret. “But we’re not just that simple,” said Lu.

“The spirit is selling sexiness — which is mainstream — to the Chinese audience, to young girls who want to have not only comfortable but also fashionable lingerie, and also reasonably priced.”

Going Mobile

Expanding Into Asia