“I think that one of the reasons Flamingo has done so well is because we put that luxury lens on food,” Christiansen says. “No one really had done that in terms of the photography and the branding and really treating food like a luxury good.”
This manifests in this summer’s pop-up with Mytheresa. Now in its second year, it was inspired by an Hermès pop-up at Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, a car show in California. “All these people were obsessing over beautiful vintage cars, and then a fashion house had a pop-up,” Christiansen says. “It makes sense that design-obsessed car enthusiasts would have a design-obsessed fashion brand there as well.”
This focus on top players — and, by proxy, top spenders — gets at why Flamingo Estate’s collaboration strategy has met with success. “The right design partner will always matter to luxury brands,” Harkin adds. Since launching in 2020, Flamingo has collaborated with top players in the luxury space from an array of industries: fashion brand The Elder Statesman (on a cashmere blanket), Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce (on a $3,000 limited-edition ice bucket), and art and design atelier Campbell Rey (on a set of bronze gardening tools).
Christiansen appreciates that Mytheresa is willing to do things beyond marketing products. “It’s really rare to meet a brand that takes risks and has fun, especially in the luxury space,” he says.
Mytheresa can afford to play. It’s on track to achieve double-digit growth in the remaining two fiscal quarters. Plus, CEO Michael Kliger knows the value of these experiences. “We try not to be just e-commerce,” he told Vogue Business in May. “You really want to be a community for luxury lovers and to be a community, you need to have the speed and the convenience of e-commerce but you also need to have these personal moments.”
Christiansen agrees: “We need theatre, we need escapism. There’s no innovation going on here — which is maybe the most innovative thing in the world.”
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