Luxury is not a transaction; it is an emotion. The true challenge for a Maison is not to adopt every innovation, but to master the Quiet Revolution.
AI strategy, digital audits, and transformation consulting for luxury Maisons — where 16 years of executive experience meets the frontier of agentic commerce.
By Sébastien Pagès — ex-Executive Director Digital, Diptyque Paris
A 40+ page AI-assisted strategic report that reveals the gap between your current UX execution and your readiness for AI-mediated commerce. 10 UX dimensions, 8 Future-Proof dimensions, competitive benchmarking, and a phased transformation roadmap — built for Comex-level conversations.
A complete audit of celine.com as Michael Rider succeeds Hedi Slimane. The results reveal a 3.7-point paradox: a Storytelling score of 8.7 against a Checkout of 4.8. The €3,600 Soft Triomphe is essentially invisible to ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — no JSON-LD, no llms.txt, no schema.org markup.
Read the full analysis →Agentic Commerce Preparedness: 1.5/10 — the lowest score in the audit. Céline's products are invisible to AI shopping agents.
The CDO answered the question of digital transformation. But who governs the autonomous agents that will interact with clients, make recommendations in your brand's voice, and execute transactions without any human in the room? This article defines the AXO — the next C-Suite role luxury needs.
Read on Substack →On high-value intents like "understated weekender bag for Gstaad," the primary interface is now an AI answer — a synthesized recommendation, not a page of links. The rules of luxury brand discovery have fundamentally changed.
Read on Substack →Tactics for controlling what the algorithm knows about your Maison, protecting what it doesn't, and making AI your most eloquent advocate. Introducing the "Black Box" strategy — the counter-intuitive luxury twist for the Zero-Click Era.
Read on Substack →Luxury CAC has hit $175+ per customer — the highest of any retail sector. The pivot to VIC economics demands a fundamental rethink of how boutique staff leverage data to build lasting relationships and justify rising acquisition costs.
Read on Substack →The consumer no longer navigates the web themselves. They delegate search, comparison, and purchase to a personal AI Agent — the new gatekeeper. When the agent optimizes for convenience, it erases the emotional dimension that justifies the aura of a Maison. The foundational essay that launched The Augmented Maison.
16 years building and scaling digital for luxury Maisons — from launching Dior Couture's first e-commerce, to doubling Christie's online sales, to multiplying Diptyque's e-commerce revenue by 8. The Augmented Maison bridges that operating experience with the strategic foresight that AI and agentic commerce demand.
I've sat where you sit — in Comex meetings, defending digital budgets, explaining why UX matters to a CFO. These audits speak that language.Sébastien Pagès