With the launch of the travel vertical, the members-only flash sales site treads more heavily into the territory of others who have been working on travel packages and other experiences for much longer.

Several other daily deals and flash sales sites have already gotten into the business of offering travel packages, including Groupon’s partnership with Expedia and Gilt Groupe’s high-end, exclusive vacations on its own Jetsetter.com.

The company’s new Lot18 Experiences will offer a twist, focusing exclusively on wine and gourmet food-themed excursions, from vineyard tours to dinners at well-known restaurants.

New York-based Lot18, which has raised roughly $13 million from investors, including the founders of Amazon-owned Diapers.com, has 550,000 members and has sold more than 500,000 bottles of wine.

The capital was expected to be used for launching new verticals; the launch of Lot18 Experiences coincides with the company’s one-year anniversary.

When it goes live today, travel packages will include a seven-week trip to several of the world’s major wine regions (Bordeaux, Napa, Mendoza, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Germany and Portugal). On a smaller scale, there will be one-night-only offers, such as food and wine pairing dinners at Auberge du Soleil in Napa and Le Bernardin in New York.

It will also launch soon in Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities, through a network of partner sites to be announced later.

In addition to wine and experiences, the site offers gourmet food products, such as olive oil, chocolate, caviar, coffee and more.

It’s skimming the cream off the top.

It will not blanket America with offers, but rather only enter markets where there’s enough luxury experiences and high-end restaurants for its target audience of highly educated, 25-to-40 year-olds (In other words–affluent, wealthy and plain ol’ rich people).

Gilt City is an extension of the New York-based Gilt Groupe, which provides invitation-only access to products and experiences at discounted prices. Gilt City competes more directly with Groupon and LivingSocial by offering discounts to spas, restaurants and cosmetic treatments, like Botox. So far, it’s launched in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.

Gilt Groupe has raised upward of $50 million in venture capital, and will still have to contend with Amazon-based LivingSocial, and Groupon, which aims to raise up to $1 billion after spurning a buyout attempt by Google.

Gilt City’s President Nathan Richardson promises us it still has aggressive goals, but that its plans look different from the others. “We won’t be in a lot of secondary markets, but there’s 40 markets that have the depth we need.”

Meanwhile, Groupon and LivingSocial are in more than 100 markets each today.

“The high-end of the market is enormous,” Richardson says.

Unlike Groupon and LivingSocial, Gilt doesn’t send out a deal every day, but rather offers up to three deals in a weekly email, because “that makes it worthy of reading in your inbox.” In Chicago it’s up to sending two a week, and in Los Angeles and New York, it’s now sending two to three.

In addition to offering discounts on restaurants, spas and beauty, Richardson says Gilt is also selling experiences.

For example, on the Fourth of July in New York, it hosted a party on the retired aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, which was positioned right under the fireworks. ”Not only did the offer sell out, we had three times as many people on wait list,” he says. ”We have the opportunity to extend our curated lifestyle brand to events. People have come to expect us to be consistent. It’s not hit or miss. We want to make sure the email surprises our customers and is always on brand and something we feel proud of.”

To make his point, Richardson often talks about the deal’s “exclusivity,” not how deep the discount is. But why would an exclusive restaurant–which presumably has no trouble selling out–be interested in offering a discount to Gilt’s subscribers?

Richardson says it’s an opportunity for these brands to introduce new opportunities or extend its franchise to a new audience.

For instance, a new restaurant opening in New York’s Flatiron District offered a deal that introduced a new menu to the public. The chef signed the menu and visited the patron’s table for a chat. Another upscale eating establishment used Gilt to promote availability of a private dinning room.

Richardson says that in a survey Gilt conducted, customers said that 80 percent of the time they had the intention of going back to a restaurant, gym or skin-care provider at full price, and in 60 percent of the cases they did go back.

Despite new reports of the funding today, the line of credit from TriplePoint Capital is months-old, and we’ve learned it was used primarily for building out a new warehouse in Louisville, Ky.

According to our sources, who declined to be named, only $5 million of the $15 million has been drawn down from the facility, and it’s one of three lines of credit the company has. The company spokeswoman declined to comment.

The Gilt Groupe is a members-only online retailer focused on luxury brands. It has seen huge success in offering deep discounts on items for short periods of time. More recently, it has set its sights on the local deals business, similar to the businesses being built by Groupon and LivingSocial. It has also expanded into offering luxury travel deals.

Gilt’s local deals site, called “Gilt City,” offers bargains on items ranging from massages to frozen yogurt. So far, it’s launched in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco. It’s going up against two feisty and well-funded competitors: LivingSocial, which just raised $175 million in capital from Amazon, and Groupon, which turned down Google’s $6 billion acquisition bid.

A round of funding raised this summer supported those product rollouts. In total, the company has raised upward of $50 million from investors, including General Atlantic and Matrix Partners.

The line of credit shows that the emerging company still needs additional financing for one-off capital projects as resources are pulled in other directions. A big focus is likely on hiring a local salesforce, which is considered a specialty of Groupon. Still, Gilt Groupe is considered one of the more likely IPO candidates, and has said in the past that it expects to achieve gross revenues of $400 million to $500 million by the end of this calendar year.

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According to a new survey from NPD, only 13 percent of iPad owners bought the device in lieu of a PC. For the other 87 percent, it was an incremental purchase, a luxury purchase.

Which to NPD analyst Stephen Baker means recent claims that the iPad is cannibalizing the PC market are overblown.

“Early adopters, like iPad owners, follow a traditional pattern of consumer behavior; they purchase products because they want them, not because they need them,” Baker explains. “However, as Apple increases iPad distribution and consumer interest peaks, the profile of an iPad owner is much more likely to mirror the overall tech population. When that does happen other tech products with similar usage profiles as the iPad, such as notebooks, netbooks, and e-readers will come under increased pressure from the iPad.”

Evidently that’s happening already. According to Baker, folks who purchased the iPad within a few months of its release were 44 percent more likely to watch YouTube videos, 50 percent more likely to watch movies, 60 percent more likely to watch TV shows, and 38 percent more likely to be reading e-books. And that type of usage behavior is, as Baker observes, “a dagger at the heart of the usage model for netbooks and secondary notebook computers.”

A personal observation: For me, the iPad started out as an incremental purchase, driven by early adopter mania. But now, having used the device for some time, I see it as a needful one. In other words, I wanted the iPad, but I didn’t realize I needed one until I had a chance to use it.

PREVIOUSLY:

• IPad: Tonight We Feast on Laptop Flesh!
• Forget Netbooks, iPad Cannibalizing Entire PC Industry
• Apple: The iPad Isn’t Cannibalizing the Mac, But We Sure Hope It’s Cannibalizing the PC

BoomTown has never set foot in the dusty dustfest in the desert that is Burning Man, due to the lack of a Four Seasons in the vicinity.

Thank goodness, then, for the live stream of the annual event–direct from Black Rock City–which runs from August 30 to September 6.

You can see it below and also on Burning Man’s Web site.

This year’s art theme at the always-innovative user-generated cultural festival, which has a big dollop of digital, is: Metropolis.

As Burning Man notes:

“Great cities are organic, spontaneous, heterogeneous, and untidy hubs of social interaction. At Burning Man 2010, we will inspect the daily course of city life and the future prospect of civilization.”

Indeed! So next year I am definitely going and building a luxury hotel from scratch with the help of my Twitter followers!

Until then, have fun, Joanne–because I will be watching the live-stream video from UStream whilst getting a mani-pedi:

Yesterday, BoomTown dropped into the lower Park Avenue offices of the New York-based Gilt Groupe, the online fashion retail site.

Since 2007, the site has raised $83 million from General Atlantic and Matrix Partners, giving it a $400 million valuation and spurring interest from investment bankers who think Gilt might be a good candidate for an initial public offering.

That’s doubtful for now, given how important it is for Gilt to solidify and expand its business, even as competition increases.

But already, Gilt has built an important consumer brand online, using its funding to expand the member-based service that offers a range of well-known fashion brands and luxury goods at sample sale prices, much like the originator of the idea–France’s Vente-Privee.

To keep all the fashion moving forward, Gilt hired former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) CEO Susan Lyne, who also was a big-time television exec at ABC, in 2008.

Along with a turbocharge of its operations as its sales grow, Gilt is also attempting to expand its offerings to travel and other experiences, via its Jetsetter site, and growing its base of local “city” sites for a range of services, such as spas.

Also on deck: More personalization for users, to better targets deals, as well as mobile versions of Gilt.

Of course, Gilt is operating in a very competitive arena, with rivals coming at the business from a number of different ways, such as Groupon, the hot discount deals start-up.

Here is the video interview I had with Lyne at Gilt’s Manhattan offices about all this and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100826/gilt-groupes-susan-lyne-talks-about-fashion-local-and-not-ipo/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20091029/private-sale-sites-grow-in-a-struggling-economy/ http://allthingsd.com/20091029/private-sale-sites-grow-in-a-struggling-economy/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:54:49 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17197 The success of private-sale sites like Gilt Groupe, which holds daily members-only sales of off-season luxury items, have led to imitators hoping to emulate the success of a business model that’s catching on with recession-strapped consumers.

Private-sale sites let shoppers experience the cachet of owning luxury items without paying full price. Their Web-only setting eliminates the public guilt of making big-ticket purchases down a down economy. And the short time in which items can be reserved in shopping carts means customers have to click fast, enhancing the allure for some.

One of the newest such sites is One Kings Lane, which focuses on furniture and other housewares. Like the Gilt model, it sells luxury goods from two or three brands a day at 50 percent to 70 percent off original prices.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091029/private-sale-sites-grow-in-a-struggling-economy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091006/the-web-helped-kill-gourmet-if-so-now-i-hate-the-internet/ http://allthingsd.com/20091006/the-web-helped-kill-gourmet-if-so-now-i-hate-the-internet/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:39:24 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=19142

Say it ain’t so.

Having fully embraced the Internet–sometimes to much disdain from old media colleagues back in the day–since the early 1990s as the way of the future in publishing, and even going to far as to abandon a career in print forever some years ago, BoomTown is bereft at the news yesterday that Gourmet magazine was being shish-kababbed.

Gourmet has been, since I started reading it as a young girl, one of the more perfect magazines–full of glamorous travel locales, stunning photos of food and sumptuous prose, all beautifully edited.

Let’s all agree first to blame owner Condé Nast, the famed magazine unit of privately held Advance Publications, for deciding to shutter the elegant and iconic Gourmet–which has been around since 1941–after the November issue.

While circulation remained steady at Gourmet at just under one million monthly paying subscribers, Condé Nast Chief Executive Officer Chuck Townsend pointed to a fall-off in advertising spending by luxury brands that resulted in a money-losing mess.

But, in a follow-up piece in The Wall Street Journal, titled “Gourmet Magazine’s Demise Gives Readers Empty Feeling,” plunging newsstand sales were also noted, apparently due in part to the impact of the Web.

“Gourmet has had to compete with food-related Web sites, which are often free and contain up-to-the-minute content,” said the Journal article.

In other words, the same thing that is occurring in all arenas–from food to tech to fashion to news–was left unsaid.

As in: The scourge of the Internet, laying waste to all those it comes in contact with.

But I dearly hope that this episode with Gourmet does not become another one of those death-by-digital cautionary tales, a case study that no one can sustain this kind of highbrow, expensive-to-make print media anymore, even the free-spending types at Condé Nast.

I am not sure that’s exactly true, though, since the analog experience Gourmet provided was not the same as what’s on the Web, which is what probably kept its circulation steady over the years.

It was clearly an issue of the econalypse–obviously helped along by the fact that people’s reading habits are shifting to online, thought that’s not the root issue.

That’s why Townsend added that Gourmet might live on in books, on television and, most likely of all, on the Internet.

That Gourmet already has a dullish Web site was not mentioned since it is free and not particularly different from the magazine–a decent repurposing, but a repurposing nonetheless.

Now that there is no magazine to fill that Web void, it will be interesting to see if more could be done online with the iconic foodie brand.

Or not.

(That September cover picture above is a quince, by the way, which most would never really know without–um, er–the help of Gourmet.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091006/the-web-helped-kill-gourmet-if-so-now-i-hate-the-internet/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090428/why-portfolios-peers-shouldnt-be-celebrating/ http://allthingsd.com/20090428/why-portfolios-peers-shouldnt-be-celebrating/#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:17:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6766 While the chattering classes continue to pick over Portfolio’s bones, it’s worth checking in on the business titles Condé Nast was targeting with its ill-fated magazine. In short: None of them are suffering from a Portfolio-like swoon, but none of them should be boasting.

Portfolio’s ad pages were down more than 60 percent in the first quarter of 2009. If you account for the magazine’s decreased frequency–it published two issues in the first free months of the year, down down from three last year–that works out to be a 40 percent drop. Here’s how its peers performed during the same period, via the Magazine Publishers of America:

McGraw-Hill’s (MHP) BusinessWeek: Down 39.8 percent

Time Warner’s (TWX) Fortune: Down 26.3 percent

Privately held Forbes: Down 15 percent

Bear in mind that the revenue numbers for each title are likely down much more dramatically. That’s because the two categories of advertisers that the business magazines have depended on to fill their pages–financial services and autos–have all received extra-vicious beatings from the economy since last summer. So the publishers are particularly vulnerable to rate card pressure. And I’m told that luxury and travel advertisers, which had stayed relatively strong through the end of 2008, fell off dramatically this year. So that can’t be good.

My contribution to the aforementioned bone-picking: Like everyone else who wrote about Portfolio yesterday, I mentioned that the magazine and Web site had reportedly been launched with a budget of $100 million or more. But let’s be clear–that’s $100 million (or more), to be spent over a five-year period.

Portfolio was around for two years, and was gestating for a year before that, and a bunch of the budget was likely spent up front. So Condé Nast likely did burn through a very large pile of cash–the New York Times’s David Carr reports that the magazine spent $30,000 last fall to “procure the services of a real elephant to menace a model at a photo shoot.” And I’d love to know what the total actually was (for the record, I asked, and no one will tell me). But it’s a stretch to think Condé Nast actually burned through nine figures on this one.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090428/why-portfolios-peers-shouldnt-be-celebrating/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081104/your-karma-ran-over-my-tesla/ http://allthingsd.com/20081104/your-karma-ran-over-my-tesla/#comments Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:16:19 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=7755 Tesla Motors has lost its Sturm und Drang race with Fisker Coachbuild. On Monday, an arbitrator ruled that Fisker did nothing untoward by introducing an electric-powered luxury sports car after doing some design work for Tesla.

As you may recall, Tesla sued Fisker Coachbuild back in April, charging that founder Henrik Fisker stole valuable company design ideas and trade secrets after it hired him to design the company’s oft-delayed plug-in electric-powered WhiteStar hybrid sedan.

Tesla claimed Fisker sabotaged the WhiteStar project by purposely drafting a subpar design that set it back three to six months, then stole proprietary Tesla technology and used it to build a competing car–the Fisker Karma. Unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show this past January, the $80,000 Karma had been scheduled to arrive at market in late 2009. Because of the production delays allegedly caused by Fisker’s designs, the WhiteStar won’t arrive until 2010.

“I think it’s ironic that Fisker chose to name his car the Karma, when what he’s done is very bad karma,” Tesla attorney Adam C. Belsky said back in April.

The arbitrator, it seems, didn’t quite agree. “The evidence is overwhelming that Fisker did nothing wrong,” he found. “The assertion of violations of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act by Fisker were baseless and neither brought nor pursued in good faith.”

A tough break for Tesla, which has been hit hard by the financial crisis, so hard that it was forced to borrow $40 million to cover its costs earlier this week.

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