Podcast | Mytheresa CEO on thriving amid the e-commerce meltdown

Welcome to The Luxury Minute by Jing Daily, where we take you inside the boardroom for unfiltered conversations with C-suite executives and creatives shaping fashion and beauty across global markets. In our second podcast episode, we speak with Michael Kliger, Chief Executive Officer at the Munich-based e-commerce retailer Mytheresa. Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Only a decade ago, luxury e-commerce retailers were hailed as the industry’s golden children. Since then, one by one, the top players have fallen from grace. Like the industry-at-large, retailers are up against significant headwinds: post-Covid consumer shifts, volatile tariffs, fluctuating spending power, and brand oversaturation. High-profile struggles, bankruptcies and near bankruptcies have hit players from SSENSE to Farfetch. Yet, amid this e-commerce armageddon, Munich-based Mytheresa is defying the odds. In the year ending June 30, 2025, it posted year-on-year net sales growth of 8.9% and a 4.9% rise in EBITDA margin, while gross merchandise value per top customer climbed 16.1% in the fourth quarter. Behind the company’s steady growth is Michael Kliger, who has led Mytheresa since 2015 with a focus on consistency, curation, and customer experience. “My objective is to have even more enthusiastic customers shopping for our brands. We are not chasing revenue. If you do that and they stay and they buy, the financials are an outcome.” says Kliger. “The last four or five years have clearly taught us that the things you don’t expect will happen. And so you better be always a bit nimble and always a bit humble for exactly those things that you didn't see coming.” Since Kliger took the helm, the luxury e-tailer has expanded globally — debuting a Chinese site in 2016 and listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. In April 2025, Mytheresa completed its acquisition of Yoox Net-a-Porter from Richemont, forming the new luxury group LuxExperience, which now encompasses Net-a-Porter, Mr Porter, Yoox, and The Outnet in addition to Mytheresa. In Jing Daily’s sit-down interview at Mytheresa’s New York office during fashion week, Kliger shares how the company finds steady growth through consistency, and his multi-year strategy for unifying the newly formed e-commerce powerhouse. Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Continue reading for excerpts from the full conversation. Jing Daily: Earlier this year, Mytheresa completed its acquisition of Yoox Net-a-Porter from Richemont, forming the group LuxExperience. This would be the first womenswear fashion season where the different retailers exist under the same group. Of course, the sites have very different propositions. How do you approach that market differentiation? Is there any strategy behind potential for customer overlap among the retailers? Michael Kliger: The fundamental premise of the deal was to acquire retailers that are differentiated. Because while there are opportunities to merge certain aspects of the business model that consumers don’t care about, the fundamental idea is to offer into the market different propositions and so to tap into different customer groups. And that is important because that will allow us to serve a broader group of customers, but not by diluting. We have, in terms of customers, less than 10% overlap today and we don’t wanna change that. You cannot avoid some overlap, but we really want to speak to different audiences and therefore we have separate buying teams. They buy what they think will fit their audience, their customers. JD: We’re in an interesting state of media and luxury. Critics, shareholders, and analysts seem to expect exponentially more from companies. Ebbs and flows are a normal part of life. Mytheresa seems to be in a flow right now. Holding this role for over a decade, how do you measure success, and how are you realistic about success given the macroeconomic realities that we live in? MK: I absolutely believe that one key driver for success in this industry is consistency. If you speak to consumers, if you want to get loyalty from consumers, which we want, you need to be consistent. They are not enjoying confusion. Yesterday you were this, tomorrow you were that. They just love reliability. Reliability sounds boring, but it’s very important to trust that consumer relationship. And that has been our approach. We built a business over 10 years and we always prefer to consistently grow. We want to grow, we want to get bigger. We want to have even more customers, but it’s not at the expense of quantity. It always starts with the customer. My objective is to have even more enthusiastic customers shopping for our brands. If you do that and they stay and they buy, the financials are an outcome. Sometimes it’s risky if you become too focused on the financials. And then the last four or five years have clearly taught us that the things you don’t expect will happen. And so you better be always a bit nimble and always a bit humble for exactly those things that you didn’t see coming. JD: Fashion is not selling toothpaste. It’s not immediately replaceable, consumable — it’s durable. Yet, we do seem to expect more sales, faster movement. How do you approach the reality and potential for luxury sales versus a fast moving consumable good? MK: We are not in toothpaste. You should use toothpaste every day. A luxury bag, you can live a pleasant life without one. But there are people out there that really desire certain bags, desire certain fine jewelry, and so it’s intriguing, and I think it’s really an important discussion at our company. Why? Because if we better understand the why then we can serve these customers better. But luxury makes you as a person feel better for whatever emotional driver there is. And it could be a multitude of things. And I think once you understand that, then you understand what you really need to offer to that customer. And it’s much more than the product, and the brands do a perfect job to evoke those emotions and we need to respect those emotions. JD: What has been Mytheresa’s strategy around tariffs? The situation is changing very rapidly and I imagine that uncertainty is difficult to navigate. MK: You have to sort of unpackage the challenge. One challenge is, of course, increasing tariffs will make products more expensive. In the beginning it is us that pay the duties, so it eats into our margin. We are looking for higher efficiencies. We are reducing shipping costs. We have seen some price increases that allow us to mitigate some of the additional duties. I think the more important challenge that we had was that all of that came very fast, came sometimes in contradictory messages. It’s a massive change in our systems in how invoices are printed. The same for our partners, the carriers. Even if the tariffs are higher, the most important thing is that everything runs smoothly and with constantly changing policies, that’s challenging. Not, at least for Made in Europe, we know what it is; we can deal with that. JD: With all the uncertainty, Mytheresa has an opportunity to really be a trusted source and connector. When it comes to the global growth of Mytheresa, what markets after the U.S. are you seeing as frontrunners? MK: The United States has become the largest country in our portfolio, but our business is global. It’s a global product. People that love luxury understand it wherever they are with whatever cultural background they have. As a multi-brand digital player, we benefit from diversification. So, if one region doesn’t work as well, another region will. But we actually don’t look at regional, or frontiers, or boundaries. Digital is global. We have a lot of customers that have multiple shipping addresses, and I don’t mean in one city, I mean in different continents. And so we ship into countries, but that’s it. It’s not our logic. Because we are consumer centric, we look at the consumers. I think sentiment wise, I see an upside opportunity in Asia, China and continued sustainability in Europe, and the United States is a bit of a hard case for prediction. JD: It sounds like betting on a single market right now is a bit of a luxury. You basically have to be strong everywhere. How do you retain that presence? MK: Absolutely. You have to be strong. Over the last years we have always made sure that we also do amazing things. We took Courreges to Shanghai there for the first time. We did an amazing event with Stella McCartney and she actually went to the university for students there. We created an event for local Chinese designers like Susan Fang where we did capsule collections and we continuously worked with our local clients. We had a beautiful event just five weeks ago. We partnered with Givenchy and had an event in Shanghai where some of our clients were able to see the latest collection of Sarah Burton. We need to be present in all geographies, and even if for three, four years, it’s not exciting, you stay. You don’t go in and out. Consumers will remember whether you stayed even in times where it was not so easy. Brands that go in and out will never have the same appreciation and trust and brands that always are around. And I think you can see that a lot of the luxury brands, the good ones, are continuously investing in China, even though sales are definitely not as good as two, three years ago. Listen to the full episode now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. The first episode featuring Edoardo Zegna is available here: Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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Podcast | Mytheresa CEO on thriving amid the e-commerce meltdown