Haven For The Haves

Moda Operandi brings the online experience into the real world in the most exclusive manner possible. Could this be the future of luxury retail?

- Matthew Schneier

The dream of many luxury fashion brands is a store on Madison Avenue, New York’s gilded thoroughfare. Moda Operandi, the e-commerce Website, whose signal innovation is to allow users to order clothes directly off the runways of fashion week, is opening just there, with the slight hitch that the store will not, at least in the traditional sense, be open.

That is because Moda Operandi Madison, which occupies two floors of a 1910 townhouse on 64th Street just west of Madison Avenue, is not a shop as conventionally understood. It is a by appointment showroom for the very few.

Those invited to buy there — likely no more than 300 per year, according to Deborah Nicodemus, Moda Operandi’s chief executive — will enter a store whose goods are customised to their sizes, tastes and tendencies, and whose salespeople know the full history of their dealings with Moda Operandi online: what they bought, browsed, bookmarked, exchanged or returned (very little, according to the company).

The selection will be tailored accordingly. Moda Operandi Madison is a store that transforms itself, with effort and tech, into whatever its current customer would hope it to be.

“Shopping online is already the perfect experience,” said Lauren Santo Domingo, a co-founder of Moda Operandi and a contributing editor at Vogue. “How are we adding to that?”