The luxury retailer’s venture builder pairs founders with grants, working retail channels and people who can say yes. Its real test comes when the pilot ends.
Canada’s old furrier survived by shrinking its map and enlarging the experience. Its useful lesson is not ‘be luxurious’ - it is to spend where digital cannot: trust, taste and human attention.
How a billionaire's family office quietly bought up 16 addresses on one downtown Dallas street - then filled them with a hotel, a dozen restaurants, a fashion flagship, and a 30-foot eyeball.
Catalyst is a Jakarta-based holding company that builds and operates luxury lifestyle e-commerce platforms in Indonesia. It is the company behind Jamtangan.com, the country's leading online-and-offline watch retailer launched in 2014, and voila.id, an Indonesian luxury multibrand fashion destination. Catalyst pairs these consumer brands with an in-house Growth & Tech team that engineers the storefronts, apps, logistics and marketing systems behind them, blending online retail with a growing network of physical flagship and offline stores.
Nordstrom is a Seattle-based fashion retailer that began as a single shoe store in 1901 and grew into one of America's best-known department store chains. It sells apparel, shoes, beauty, accessories and home goods across full-line Nordstrom stores, off-price Nordstrom Rack locations, small-format Nordstrom Local service hubs and its digital platforms. Long defined by high-touch customer service and a liberal returns culture, the company returned to family control in May 2025 when the Nordstrom family and Mexican retailer El Puerto de Liverpool took it private in a roughly $6.25 billion deal.
Oscar de la Renta is a New York luxury fashion house founded in 1965 by the Dominican-American couturier of the same name. Known for feminine, occasion-driven evening wear and bridal gowns rooted in European couture craftsmanship, the brand designs ready-to-wear, accessories, handbags, jewelry, fragrances and home goods. It has dressed first ladies, celebrities and society clients for six decades and today operates as a private, family-run business led by CEO Alex Bolen, selling through boutiques, department stores and its own e-commerce.
ChatLabs is an AI company that helps consumer and luxury brands turn social-media attention into commerce. It began as the self-described first AI-powered social commerce platform, building hyper-personalized 'Social eXperiences' that carry shoppers from an Instagram or Facebook ad into a native-feeling, brand-controlled experience. It has since expanded into an AI product photography and brand creative studio that generates studio-quality product images, lifestyle visuals and performance ads without traditional photoshoots. Incubated by LVMH's innovation accelerator and a winner of the 2023 LVMH Data & AI Innovation Award, ChatLabs counts brands across the LVMH Group, plus Samsung Electronics and others, among its users.