Mass market retailers aren’t the only ones betting on a banner online holiday sales season.
Christie’s auction house has launched its worldwide “Luxury Week” with beefed up offerings to meet this year’s record demand. (Week this year is a loose designation, given that some of the sales have already started, and many last through mid-December.)
“This year we’ve seen a 200% increase in the number of [online] sales,” for November and December says Caroline Ervin, a head of e-commerce for Christie’s jewelry department.
Last year, Christies hosted just four online-only luxury sales in the same November/December stretch. Those sales carried a high estimate of about $9.5 million. This year there will be 12, with a total high estimate of just under $40 million, a 322% increase. “It’s just a response to the market,” Ervin says.
Sotheby’s, which is hosting its own live and online December luxury sales under the heading “The Festival of Wonder,” has already quadrupled its year-over-year volume of online sales, and quintupled its total, which currently stands at $150.5 million, according to the auction house. Of that amount, $79.7 million has gone to online jewelry sales—nine times greater than last year—and $41.95 million, or five times as much as 2019, has gone to watch sales.
Meanwhile 1stDibs, the online platform for high-end furniture, art and jewelry, has seen gross merchandise value rise year over year by 30% for the 10 months since Covid-19 hit. And in the last two months leading up to the holidays, “we’ve seen an acceleration in growth,” says David Rosenblatt, 1stDibs’s chief executive officer.
It’s not just the number of online auctions that have risen. Buyers’ price threshold has shot far beyond anyone’s expectations.
“Historically, we’ve viewed [the ceiling for] sales as $20,000,” Ervin says. “We wanted to offer a few higher-value lots in each sale to see how clients responded, and [then] it boomed.”
Before 2020, an online-only sale for a single lot at Christie’s had topped $80,000; this year, 25 sold for more than $100,000. One of those lots was a 28.86-carat diamond ring that sold for $2.1 million.
At 1stDibs, the gross merchandise value for sales of objects over $100,000 are up 60% year over year, says Rosenblatt. “Demand has risen for everything we sell.”