A private sales club

A couple of weeks ago, the French online sales company Vente-Privée invited me to visit their offices in Paris. Along with Miss at la playa and 8 other European bloggers, I had the opportunity to discover a gigantic company that was very different from what I initially imagined.


The first thing that strikes you is its size; in Spain alone, there are already over a million members, but across Europe, there are more than 10 million. So, the modest offices I expected to find actually occupy the former headquarters of a major French newspaper. They are bustling with activity, filled with works of art, hundreds of employees averaging 31 years old, and photography, video, sound, editing, and layout studios... it's impressive.


Since you're probably wondering why a mini audiovisual production company is needed to sell online, let's follow the development of a sale together, and you'll see that by the end of this post, you'll want to send them your CV.

• Launch: A Project Manager (I insist, they are no older than 35) is appointed. They are responsible for managing relationships with brands that agree to sell their stock through Vente-Privée. They select the items to be sold, categorize them, and set prices.

• Brainstorming: A creative team is assigned to translate the brand's image into the online sales universe. For each brand, a presentation trailer, ambient photos, and individual look photos are created, and everything, absolutely everything, is done in-house at Vente-Privée's offices.

• Photo shoots: In one of the 60 photographic studios—yes, you read that right, 60 (and they're building another building next door to expand them because they're getting too small, ha!)—mini editorials are prepared to create ambient photos and photos of each look from five different viewpoints, totaling a staggering 12,000 photographs daily.

• Retouching: Of course, every single photo has to be retouched to look perfect, so you can imagine the number of people working in the editing department, and I emphasize, how incredibly young they are.

• Trailers: In addition to photos, videos are also recorded and sent to the "motion design" department, where they produce a trailer between 40 seconds and one minute long in 5 days.

• Add music: Every trailer needs sound, so 6 in-house musicians are responsible for composing and adjusting the most suitable sounds and melodies for each brand.

• Ready: Combining all the above, the sale is now ready and everything is uploaded to the website to be available for members on a specific date that Vente-Privée communicates via email beforehand. Needless to say, there are several departments for web design, smartphone application design, blog administration... by the way, an interesting fact, Vente-Privée's blog is the most followed and commented in all of France, even surpassing those of the most renowned bloggers.

• I bought it!: Once purchases begin, the logistics of the distribution warehouses are set in motion. These are gigantic places where thousands of products are checked, labeled, organized, and stored until each order is assembled. You wouldn't want to work here, see? No, it's hot, and there isn't a single seat for miles around. Make it very clear that you want nothing to do with logistics.

• It's done: The package arrives at your house in plain brown boxes without logos so your neighbors aren't tempted by what's not theirs, and if you have any problems, there's after-sales service and the possibility of returns.

Well? Amazing, isn't it? But wait, there's more. It turns out that as a promotional and marketing tool, they created an internal magazine that they only distribute to the brands they work with, so they have a testament to the level of graphic quality they offer and are thus persuaded to put themselves in their hands. The magazine is called Rosebuzz, and here are some photos from the latest issue.