Source: Mytheresa
The strategic advantages and risks of Mytheresa’s Top Customer program within its luxury e-commerce business.
In fiscal 2026, just 4.8% of Mytheresa’s customers generated 48.4% of its gross merchandise value (GMV). These are the members of its Top Customer program, a group whose importance extends well beyond its size. Their spending helps explain why the retailer places such emphasis on personal relationships, exceptional access, and an intimate understanding of how its clients want to shop.
The concentration is striking, but its significance lies in the business built around it. Mytheresa’s approach offers a way to think about growth through deeper relationships with a carefully chosen clientele. It also introduces dependencies that deserve scrutiny. For luxury leaders, the question is how this focus becomes a commercial advantage, why similar retailers have experienced different outcomes, and what it takes to keep that advantage intact.
Mytheresa’s Customer Philosophy
Mytheresa approaches its audience with a clear understanding that luxury shoppers have different relationships with fashion. Some buy frequently and expect a retailer to anticipate their needs. Others invest regularly but selectively, while occasional customers may save for a single meaningful purchase. Its customer philosophy recognizes three broad profiles, each with different expectations and spending habits:
Top luxury consumers: Frequent purchasers seeking seasonal newness, high-touch service, and quick delivery.
Everyday luxury fashion enthusiasts: Typically working professionals who regularly invest in statement pieces and fashion for special occasions.
Intermittent luxury fashion consumers: Followers of fashion who save for occasional iconic purchases.
The first two groups are Mytheresa’s target audience. The strategic rationale for focusing on them is their greater potential for loyalty, appreciation of differentiated services, and share of spending. Its Top Customer program concentrates attention on its most valued clients: members represent 4.8% of the overall customer base and generate 48.4% of GMV. Given their contribution to the business, they receive a more personal level of attention.
For these clients, personal shoppers learn their preferences, recommend pieces, and stay in touch through the channels they find most convenient. Early access and exclusive collections make the relationship more rewarding, while private events create opportunities to connect beyond a transaction. The appeal is easy to understand: a retailer that knows your taste can make shopping feel both more effortless and more interesting.
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Luxury Retailer Performance
Mytheresa’s current performance appears to justify its customer philosophy. Its business has grown while maintaining positive adjusted EBITDA, and greater spending within the customer base has supported growth even as active customer numbers declined. Full-price selling has also helped improve gross margin. The strategic significance is that Mytheresa has been able to grow without relying on a continually larger audience or heavier promotions.
NET-A-PORTER offers a particularly useful comparison because it also places considerable emphasis on a small group of valuable clients. Its Extremely Important People, or EIP, program combines personal shopping, early access, and private events. The resemblance extends to customer concentration: in the combined NET-A-PORTER and MR PORTER business, 4.3% of Net-a-Porter and Mr Porter customers accounted for 49% of the segment's gross merchandise value.
Yet a valuable clientele demands an exceptional experience, and NET-A-PORTER has not always consistently met that expectation. Customers have complained about inconsistent service, missing packages, and slow returns—shortcomings that help explain the need to rebuild relationships with its most important shoppers.
Following its acquisition in 2025, NET-A-PORTER is now part of LuxExperience, the same group that owns Mytheresa, and is pursuing a turnaround that includes improving delivery and returns, strengthening personal shopping, and restoring or adding desirable labels. Changes to buying and customer targeting are accompanied by efforts to simplify infrastructure and costs. The lesson is that strategy alone is insufficient: serving demanding clients requires a standard of excellence that carries through every part of the experience.
MATCHES was a luxury e-commerce retailer that also depended heavily on valuable clients. Historically, a small minority of customers accounted for over a third of its sales. Nevertheless, its subsequent collapse shows that having high-spending shoppers does not ensure a business continues to serve them effectively. Its difficulties extended beyond the economic pressures facing the entire luxury retail market, and illustrates how a retailer can have valuable customers and still undermine its economics by pursuing a poor strategy.
Its assortment was poorly positioned leaving it with stock that did not match demand. Rising operating expenses and inefficient marketing compounded the problem. And heavy promotions and markdowns pursued customer spending at the expense of margin. The business entered administration after its owner decided that continuing losses and further funding requirements were unviable. The MATCHES brand is preparing a relaunch under new ownership, but that is a separate chapter from the original business that failed.
These comparisons make Mytheresa’s approach more instructive. All three retailers have served important private clients, but their outcomes show how much depends on the quality of service, the relevance of the assortment, and the cost of securing each sale. Mytheresa’s current advantage seems to lie in its sustained attention to those requirements.
Mytheresa’s Operating Principles
Mytheresa’s success with a concentrated clientele appears to rest on a set of operating principles that make the strategy commercially sustainable. The comparison with its peers gives these principles practical meaning: they help explain how valuable customer relationships can support growth, and what must be protected to prevent that advantage from weakening.
Selection
Knowing whom the business serves gives buying and service a common reference point. Exclusive pieces and thoughtful recommendations have particular value for clients who shop frequently and expect something beyond availability. A clear customer focus can bring greater purpose to the assortment and make investment decisions more coherent.
Resilience
Frequent luxury buyers offer a different demand base from shoppers saving for an occasional purchase. The strategic appeal is reduced dependence on spending that may be easily deferred. This can offer a degree of protection, although affluent clients still respond to economic uncertainty and changing priorities. Resilience depends on their continued willingness to spend as well as their capacity to do so.
Discipline
Full-price demand gives the model a stronger commercial foundation. Mytheresa has deliberately reduced promotional activity aimed at aspirational customers while directing investment toward promising acquisition opportunities and top-customer retention. The contrast with MATCHES is relevant: competing harder for spending through promotions can weaken the margins needed to sustain the experience.
Prioritization
When a small group contributes so much, investing in those relationships has a clear strategic rationale. Personal attention and privileged access give clients reasons to return and direct more spending to the platform. The investment remains sound only if the resulting business supports the cost of delivering it. Customer devotion and commercial judgment have to develop together.
Source: Mytheresa
Mytheresa’s Operational Challenges
Despite these operating strengths, a concentrated customer strategy leaves Mytheresa exposed to changes within a relatively small group. The relationships that support growth can also transmit a slowdown quickly if clients reduce purchases or take their spending elsewhere. Economic uncertainty may change their appetite for fashion even when affordability is not an immediate concern. Financial capacity provides some protection, but continued willingness to buy remains essential.
Acquiring more of these customers also presents a growth challenge. A selective audience offers fewer suitable prospects than a broad market, and competitors may be pursuing the same people. Existing relationships have limits to how much additional spending they can yield. Mytheresa therefore needs to cultivate future top customers alongside established ones, giving everyday enthusiasts room to develop a deeper relationship with the platform.
Loyalty can weaken for reasons unrelated to the economy. Another retailer may offer better access, a brand may build a closer direct relationship, or a trusted personal shopper may leave. Clients’ tastes can also evolve beyond the assortment. Staying relevant requires responsive buying and consistent service, while avoiding an escalating cost of attention that erodes the value of retention. The model’s strength carries an ongoing obligation to keep earning preference.
Mytheresa’s Next Chapter
In its next phase, Mytheresa’s management expects continued sales growth and slightly higher profitability. Sustaining that ambition requires a balance between deepening existing relationships and finding clients who can develop into the next generation of top customers. Further growth will depend on maintaining the relevance and service that make those relationships worth more over time.
The challenges already identified give this next chapter its priorities. Mytheresa needs to anticipate changing tastes, preserve access to desirable merchandise, and ensure that personal service remains consistent as the business expands. It must also understand when additional attention produces meaningful loyalty and when it simply adds cost. The task is to extend the customer strategy while preserving the commercial discipline that makes it work.
Insights for Luxury Professionals
Mytheresa’s approach makes a persuasive case for selective growth. Its current performance suggests that a clearly chosen customer can support a coherent business when merchandise, service, and investment follow the same priorities. The experiences of NET-A-PORTER and MATCHES add an essential condition: customer appeal needs sustained brand and commercial discipline to provide durable financial strength.
For luxury leaders, the lesson is to look beyond the size of the audience to the quality of the relationships being built. A focused strategy earns its value through relevant choices, thoughtful attention, and economics that allow those standards to endure. Exclusivity becomes an advantage when the business can keep delivering the experience that makes clients return.
